Tali Roth
Known for her richly layered and characterful interiors, designer Tali Roth’s Melbourne home is a personal reflection of the work and sensibility that have defined her international practice.
The most beautiful thing about this house has nothing to do with the terrazzo, the original Murano lighting or the Palladiana flooring. It’s the toys scattered throughout the house, the hand drawings Blu-Tacked to the kids’ walls, the dried Special K ground into the sisal rug – and the people in it.
As someone who has spent their career obsessing over the precise grain of a piece of timber or the exact angle of a light fixture, that might sound like a contradiction. But the longer I live in this house, the more I understand that all those decisions were in service of one thing: creating a place where people feel completely at ease. It’s a place where people stay longer than they had intended to, where something loosens in them from the moment they walk through the front door.
We were in New York when we bought this house. Marcus and I were living there and had recently welcomed our second child when it came to market – a mid-century gem virtually untouched in Caulfield North, the suburb we had both grown up in. There was something almost cinematic about it, a Robert Rosh house sitting quietly on the same street it had always known, waiting.
When the pandemic hit, we returned to Melbourne to renovate, and life and construction unfolded simultaneously, joyfully and sometimes chaotically. The only structural move we made was to open up the eat-in kitchen, a decision that unlocked the heart of the house. From that point, the brief became clear: honour what was already there. The original timber detailing in the kitchen became our guide, and we carried that warmth throughout, replacing laminate with the real thing wherever we could.
Ruby, our third, arrived in the midst of it all. The house was built for two children, and a third threw off the balance in the best possible way. It’s something we still haven’t quite figured out, and we probably won’t for some time.
The renovation created the bones, but the house’s spirit has been shaped by the objects we brought into it. The vintage B&B Italia sofa we shipped home was transformed when reupholstered in purple wool, and the Pierre Paulin Mushroom chair, originally acid green, was re-covered in the most magnificent blue mohair. A custom dining table in steel and Rosso Francia marble anchors the room, as I knew it would, and the Murano glass sconces in the kitchen catch the afternoon light in a way that still stops me.
The pieces that bring me the most joy are not always the most valuable ones. There’s the tiny oil painting in the kitchen that I love deeply and disproportionately, and the vintage Osvaldo Borsani coat rack standing in the foyer that holds the accumulated chaos of three children’s school bags and somehow looks beautiful doing it.
My favourite ritual here is entertaining, though not in the way that I once imagined. This season of life looks like the kids’ friends tumbling through the front door on a Saturday afternoon, their parents following behind with bottles of wine. It looks like three conversations happening at once around the marble table while someone’s toddler bolts down the marble steps. It’s the kind of evening that begins at 6pm and ends at midnight because nobody wants to be the first to leave.
This house holds all of that effortlessly. That might be its greatest quality.
Is this a forever home? I genuinely don’t know. What I do know is that it is the right home for right now: for this loud, tender, improbable season of life. I designed it for a life that I hoped we would grow into, and somehow the house has met us there at every turn. And if we do eventually outgrow this home, we will leave it to the next family with enormous gratitude.
