Like most Australians, Tali Roth, the founder of Studio Tali Roth, grew up in an Australian suburb that she confesses was “a bit grey with lots of manicured lawns.” But inside she was crafting an attitude – the glow-up – which she now dedicates to interior design.
“I loved the glow up as a kid: dying my friend’s eyelashes, plucking their eyebrows, giving them makeovers and dressing them – I really like the process of helping people develop their sense of self, through their interiors,” says Roth. It’s unsurprising then that Roth’s interiors are idiosyncratic, using textured and coloured wall finishes, wallpapers, carefully curated objects – sometimes a little ‘ugly, but balanced’ – reupholstered vintage furnishings and materials to effuse her interiors with this “glow-up.”
View gallery
In 2013, a few days after graduating from RMIT interior design, Roth emigrated to New York without a plan. For many interior designers, New York is known as the city that produced eminent interior decorator and socialite Elsie De Wolfe whose 1913 book The House in Good Taste: Design Advise from America’s First Interior Decorator highlights the capacity of design to individuate interiors at a time when apartment buildings modelled on repeated floor plates was booming. “Every room in every house has its own suggestion for an original treatment,” wrote De Wolfe.
Roth picked up on this legacy noticing that in America “there is a lot more to the interior experience,” working on “maybe 70 jobs” before establishing a New York based studio in 2015. The project titled 5th Avenue is an interior fit out in Manhattan that uses eclectic colours, finishes, objects and furniture to vary atmospheric experiences throughout the apartment. Dark textural volumes fold into bright warm interiors, revealing how New York has interiorised Roth’s design approach.
View gallery
“In Australia, we have these big windows looking out; it’s about the way that the outside interacts with the inside. When you go to a city like New York all the apartments have small windows and you rely on a completely different skill set to make a space,” says Roth.
View gallery
In 2020, Roth returned to Melbourne to reestablish her practice. Terrazzo Palazzo is a family home distinguished by deeply personalised eclectic colours, finishes, objects and furniture. ‘I just want to make spaces that that evoke something in people’, Roth says.