At home with

Complete perfection’s not the goal for fashion designer Sarah Harris Gould’s décor — unique and interesting is.

Sarah Harris Gould.

Half of design duo Harris Tapper (with her friend Lauren Tapper), Sarah Harris Gould lives in Grey Lynn, Auckland, in the home she renovated with her husband, Harry. She says what she loves most about their new spaces is more of a feeling than something tangible — she always feels calm and happy here.

How long have you been living here, Sarah?

My husband Harry and I bought this property in 2016. The paint job was polarising, the bathroom was situated in the sunniest part of the house and the garden was incredibly overgrown, but we were attracted by the location and the renovation opportunities. We lived here for about a year before we started renovating, which gave us time to really understand what we wanted.

And what was that?

To reconfigure the kitchen/living space and bathroom to make the former more open-plan and both more conducive to modern life. Harry and I had a strong vision, so we enlisted T Plus Architects to draw it up and Urry & Burgess Construction to help bring it to life.

How would you describe your interior aesthetic?

Eclectic. I like to include things I haven’t seen in other people’s homes. My aesthetic is darker than Harry’s, so we clash a little when it comes to choosing furniture; our black Mongolian goat-hair chair from Mid Century Swag was a hard sell. For the most part, though, our tastes are aligned, so that makes things easy.

You have an eye for interesting furniture and objects — where do you find them?

Reimagining objects in unrelated settings is something I’ve always loved doing. When I was younger, I’d collect small objects from everywhere and make jewellery to sell. This has carried into my adult life and into interiors. I always pop into charity stores if I’m passing by and small New Zealand towns have some exceptional secondhand shops. In Auckland, I keep tabs on what Babelogue, Mid Century Swag and Flotsam &

Jetsam have in stock — they’re all so beautifully curated.

What informs Harris Tapper’s aesthetic?

Our aesthetic is driven by so many different things, but a large part of it is imagining our community of Harris Tapper women — how they live and how our clothes can evolve with them. Art and design has always been a big inspiration for us and we often look to female artists and creatives to inform our collections, but at the end of the day, it comes down to what we feel our woman needs from her wardrobe, and what her lifestyle’s like. We want women to feel, above all else, like themselves.

What’s coming up for your label?

We have a goal to find a balance between environmentally responsible practices and sustainable business planning. We’ve recently opened up a preorder system on harristapper.com, where customers can pre-purchase pieces from upcoming seasons before we go into production. Not only does this allow our community to be better informed about the product they’re buying before it’s actually produced, it also matches supply with demand, allowing us to reduce overproduction and waste. We hope it can be used as a tool to inform smarter forecasting and buying for our online store, translating into more efficient production, because we’ll only be making pieces with a proven sales track record, ordered by our customers and exclusive wholesale partners, thus removing the risks of overproduction and surplus stock.

PHOTOGRAPHY Duncan Innes SUIT YOURSELF Sarah’s fail-safe feel-good outfit is her Harris Tapper suiting. “I always gravitate toward a comfortable black suit — I love the versatility,” she says. The intriguing homeware seen here includes an ottoman covered in fabric by Kelly Wearstler from Warwick and a lamp from The Collective.

TOP LEFT On the couple’s French antique dining table from Vitrine (the chairs are from there too) is a rubber vase by Gaetano Pesce. In the kitchen, the mid-century bar stools are secondhand, the lamp was a gift to Sarah from Harry from House of Hackney and the palm tree vase next to it is from Junk & Disorderly. Sarah made the shelf herself from a piece of broken stone from Artedomus. ABOVE This artwork is Back There by Matt Arbuckle; the one seen in the kitchen/dining space on the previous page is The Cook’s Companion by Dick Frizzell.