Designing for her husband meant that Tamsin Johnson had license to nudge ideas a little harder in the fashion designer’s recently opened new New York location.

Patrick and Tamsin Johnson are a design super-force. The married couple are both leaders in their respective fields. Tamsin’s interiors and Patrick’s bespoke fashion are adored both locally and globally.

It’s no surprise then that when the pair team up, they are an even more magnetic duo, as evident in the interiors Tamsin designed for Patrick’s business, P Johnson Tailors.

“We are significantly involved in each other’s creative thinking and creative processes, so it’s not difficult to arrive at the right endpoint,” says Tamsin of the pair’s collaborative dynamism. “It’s enjoyable knowing your partner has your back and your license to fully extend yourself is always there. When you’re as close to the business as I am our trajectory is particularly mutual. It really doesn’t suffer any boundaries or compromises.”

For the fashion designer’s new Soho location, Tamsin approached the interiors in much the same way that she had for the business’s Australian outposts. “I have designed all the P Johnson spaces and the brief is nothing except to further evolve and enrich the experience for the P Johnson clientele,” the designer explains.

“The P Johnson NY showroom is a very fresh and charming space. It is light-filled and very much an idiomatic extension of P Johnson’s Australian flagship spaces. I wanted a comfortable living-room-like feeling to the space.”

Given that clients are invited to spend a lot of time in the space, Tamsin wanted to avoid any direct reference to the sense of it being a ‘shop’.

“I want people to feel like they can and should hang around,” she adds. “People come to make meaningful wardrobe additions rather than to ‘shop’ in the pass-time sense of it, so the store needs to really create a beautiful theatre for it.”

To underscore the concept, the designer has infused the space with domestic-leaning pieces that collectively convey a sense of home. Hard-edged travertine tables, Jonothan Zawada marble side tables and a white gloss painted floor are offset by white Belgian linen sofas, antique Turkish rugs and rattan blinds.

The designer, known for her extensive use of vintage items has also incorporated French 1970s lighting, LC7 Corbusier seating and artwork by Bill Henson and Antonie Tapies. “The Tapies and Kapoor works are really some of my long term favourite art pieces and such great antitheses of one another, yet utterly harmonious,” Tamsin adds. 

The effect is undeniably casual, collected and inviting. “P Johnson has always operated a little more like a hospitality business and the feeling needed to endorse that – to slow down, sit down, have a conversation, and lose the transactional urgency,” concludes the designer.

Interiors – tamsinjohnson.com
Photography – Glen Allsop

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