MY SPACE

Elisabeth Findlay is fashion royalty, having co-founded Zambesi with her husband Neville in 1979. The couple live in an Auckland villa

Zambesi’s Elisabeth Findlay tells us about her favourite place.

Can you describe this space? “We live in an Edwardian villa which we’ve renovated. It had unsightly tack-on service rooms that we removed about 30 years ago to create this conservatory. This area adjoins the kitchen. It’s a long narrow room with double-height steel-framed joinery that I love, french doors opening onto a deck, and concrete floors. We planted all these baby nīkau palms at ground level and, at the time, I wondered if they’d grow tall enough for us to see them out of the windows. Now they’re almost three storeys high.

“We had some other old bits of furniture in here but one day I walked into a sale at Matisse and saw this amazing lime green couch with a very organic shape and I said, ‘Oh my God that would look so perfect.’ It’s the Freeform Sofa by Isamu Noguchi. It has a little footstool that goes with it and it looks so good with the colour of the nīkau. There’s something about that combination of green and black that draws me in.” How do you enjoy this space?

“I love the light in here, especially towards the end of the day, just before the sun sets. I have a few of my favourite books on a Noguchi table that’s against the wall and it’s just a great place to sit and read or reflect. If a friend comes to visit we might relax here. It’s very private and it has a certain serenity.”

Is there a crossover between your interior style and your work as a designer? “I don’t like the feeling of a staged home. There are a lot of areas in this house that need re-doing but Neville and I love the patina of what’s gone before. We’ve always surrounded ourselves with eclectic things, and I design the same way – I’m drawn to something like a piece of fabric and I’m inspired. My choices are always instinctive and I don’t like being categorised, in clothing or interiors. I want to retain some mystery.

“That’s the great thing about my life — experimenting and changing and doing things that feel right at the time.”