Shaynna Blaze Success by designs
Shaynna Blaze has ruffled a few feathers in her role as judge on reality building juggernaut The Block. As she tells Genevieve Gannon, interior design is no place for prima donnas.
There are few greater voyeuristic thrills than getting to peek inside the home of an interior designer. Like snooping in the pantries of celebrity chefs, or exploring a fashion maven’s wardrobe, the task is part exploration, part fact-finding mission, as you keep a watchful eye for secrets you can steal for yourself. What oil does the chef keep on high rotation? What vintage of red does the sommelier prefer? The luxurious, Victorian-era home of interior designer and TV personality Shaynna Blaze does not disappoint.
“I love classic,” Shaynna says, taking
The Weekly on a tour of the open plan living and kitchen space. “It will look good now, but it will also look good in 20 years.”
Shaynna has become a household name as a judge on the Nine Network’s The Block and star of Foxtel’s Selling Houses Australia. In her pre-television life, she performed jazz in places such as Melbourne’s Manchester Lane while her parents babysat her two children. With their support, Shaynna juggled motherhood, a design job and a singing career. Famously called the “original Duracell bunny” by fellow judge on The Block, Neale Whitaker, she emphatically says that she hates laziness and has always been that way.
“I was sawing wood and drilling holes, I was hammering nails, I was lugging stuff,” she says of her early home design career. When her daughter, Carly, was born, Shaynna brought her to building sites in her baby capsule.
Once she had established herself as a designer, Shaynna took a writing course in order to pen newspaper columns (she also completed three
novels), and approached various morning shows to pitch a segment offering home design advice. They all said no.
“They were right to knock me back because, really, who was I?” says Shaynna, unleashing her infectious laugh. “I hadn’t done any major things, so why would people look at me as an expert?”
Yet her idea proved to be prescient. Since the day Shaynna enrolled in an interior design course – a discipline, she says, that nobody really understood at the time – there has been an explosion in the DIY renovation and decorator industry.
Australians have a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for improving their homes and Shaynna believes TV shows such as The Block have had a lot to do with that. “The design world has completely changed and a lot of it does have to do with Selling Houses and The Block,” she says.
Success brought with it many opportunities. The black mesh and copper chandelier that hangs above her kitchen island is her own design. Shaynna keeps fit by boxing with Dannii Minogue in the gym run by her personal trainer husband, Steve Vaughan. He’ll tell you that he owes much of his success to his wife’s unwavering faith that hard work will win out. “I wouldn’t be where I am now if it wasn’t for Shaynna,” he says, emphatically.
Yet it hasn’t all been a bed of roses for Shaynna.
Interior life
As Shaynna’s star has risen, she has also become acquainted with the darker side of fame. With notoriety comes scrutiny and, being in the public eye, some people see her as fair game. This is probably exacerbated by her frankness on air.
Her critiques on The Block have ruffled feathers and reduced some competitors to tears, including Block favourites Alisa and Lysandra.
During one season, contestant Deanne Jolly explosively called her Shaynna a “Bogan from Wantirna”, declaring she would “out-style” the judge any day. “She’ll want to keep away from me at the wrap party if she shows up,” she added.
Shaynna says she stands by her critiques and when it comes to the contestants, she is able to put things into perspective. “They’re tired, they’re grumpy and they’ve put their heart and soul into it,” she says. “The last thing they want is someone to tell them, actually, it isn’t a great job. Not everyone takes criticism well.”
It’s the public response to her judgements that has sometimes gotten out of hand. “There were a couple of times when it was really quite nasty for no reason at all and then what happened was some public latched onto it,” Shaynna says.
“That is, I think, disgusting. But it’s one of those things that I turn off. I see it for what it is. Real people don’t do that.”
She admits it can be hurtful, but she always tries to rise above the rabble. “The only time it really hurt me was when it was affecting my kids and my husband,” she says.
Hard yakka
For all her on-screen polish, Shaynna is a woman who is not afraid to get her hands dirty. Raised in Melbourne’s east by a stay-at-home mother, Annette, and a fitter-turner father, Basil, who had a penchant for making sugar flowers for cakes, Shaynna is no pushover.
“I’ve swept floors, cleaned toilets, I’ve worked in bars. Done jobs that I’d come home and cry I hated so much, but I just had to,” she says.
“I had to put food on the table, I had to pay my rent and you’ve got to be able to think that you’re doing that so it helps you follow your dream because you can’t always do your dream job.”
Her father was a frustrated artist, who loved to knit. Her mother adored music and would fill the house with her own renditions of Shirley Bassey classics. It is only in recent years, Shaynna says, that she appreciates how influential both her mother and father were. While they were fierce supporters when she was starting out, they didn’t get to see the heights of success that their daughter reached.
Her dad died of a heart attack before Shaynna’s TV career took off. Her mother was lost to Alzheimer’s long before her death last year. Shaynna’s children, Carly and Jess, were still in primary school. Juggling children, work and being there for her mother was hard, to say the least. Fortunately, their shared love of music helped with that connection.
“They say when you’ve got Alzheimer’s, the last thing to leave you is music. And that was the most amazing thing,” Shaynna says.
“Mum wouldn’t know who you were and you couldn’t actually communicate, but if you hummed or sang a song, she’d sing it with you.”
Now, Shaynna’s life is on the up-swing again. A new, supercharged season of
The Block is back on our screens and her collection of bed linen, towels, vases and cushions is on the shelves of Harris Scarfe stores. As she talks about the design process, it is clear that this is where Shaynna is happiest.
She has filled her house with “things that make you feel good when you touch them”.
“All my practicality is about things that you do on a daily basis and having things that are beautiful, but you’re not too scared to use,” she says.
“All my practicality is about having things that are beautiful.”