Flack Studio celebrates a bold and prosperous first decade as a practice with a new coffee table book featuring well-known and as-yet unpublished projects.

Out now through Rizzoli, Flack Studio: Interiors captures the meteoric rise of one of Australia’s most-admired interior design studios, which was founded in Melbourne in 2014 by David Flack.

Thirteen projects photographed – and in some cases rephotographed – by Anson Smart trace the studio’s maturation into one focused on interiors that are, in Flack’s words, “meant to be felt”. 

Flack Studio: Interiors reflects on the studio’s first decade.

An effusive foreword from Amy Astley affirms this execution of design intent. The Architectural Digest editor helped propel Flack Studio to global acclaim in 2021 when her platform’s viral Open Door video toured Flack’s layered design for Australian popstar Troye Sivan’s Melbourne home.

But the book’s introduction, written by Flack, winds back the clock to his early life in Bendigo. He recounts a creative childhood spent regularly redecorating, repainting and reinventing a cubby house built by his father. This ‘canvas’ for his imagination – one day a travel agency, the next, a flower shop – was eventually abandoned after taunts from grade six peers.

“It’s almost like I’m still just living in that cubby house,” he tells Australian Design Review. “Or creating cubby houses for everyone, in a funny kind of way.”

David Flack inside Terrace House, the project on the cover of his new coffee table book.

Ten years, as told by clients

In addition to the designer’s own reflections, first-hand accounts from clients help to unfold the experimental evolution of the studio. Authors Evan and Ian Roberts collated these accounts during interviews with clients inside their completed projects, with some input from Flack.

“We started to realise that we should write it from the client’s perspective, rather than our perspective,” Flack says. “That was really special, hearing their stories. The pictures show you everything that we’ve done, don’t they? But they don’t tell you the person behind the house.”

Sivan’s point of view appears twice – accompanying photos of his Flack-designed houses in Melbourne and Los Angeles. There are also words from Simone and Steven of the Tamarama residence, a 2023 project that is anything but a beige beach house. Then there’s Coco and Peter, owners of the Redfern abode, who apparently shed their belongings for the ‘full Flack experience’. 

In their edited reflections, these clients talk of the designer’s ability to “find and expand” the creativity of others, describing a “sort of knowing that’s almost mysterious”.

Presented non-chronologically, the projects in the book also showcase the studio’s chic commercial prowess, including the earthy and deeply Australian design for Ace Hotel Sydney, which won the IDEA 2022 Overall Project of the Year.

Picking the cover

Terrace House, a Melbourne project from 2023, nabbed the cover spot. Flack tells ADR that the final shot took about four hours to get right.

The cover photograph was the result of nearly four hours of shooting.

“Most people may not even know who we are, so it’s that immediate touchpoint where it’s capturing the studio in one image,” Flack says, adding that this Victorian Terrace revival project is one of his favourites.

“That room is just so intense – in a good way. It looks simple, but it’s so complex; there are so many materials in there. You would theoretically look at that and think, ‘That’s a hot mess,’ but it weirdly just works so beautifully.”

Sharing pages with collaborators

Flack Studio: Interiors isn’t shy to highlight the firm’s external collaborators. It shouts out the likes of landscape designers Florian Wild, lighting locals Volker Haug Studio, Tasmanian loudspeaker design studio Pitt & Giblin, alongside a huge swathe of contemporary artists and nods to the pioneers behind numerous vintage pieces. This aversion to gatekeeping is in sync with the studio’s inclination to open its doors and invite in the design curious, a community philosophy spearheaded by the late studio director Mark Robinson. 

“I feel that, if you’re keeping all your cards close to your chest, then, I don’t know…” Flack trails off. “
By the time someone’s ready to copy [an idea] or try and use it, you’re years in advance. If they want to do that, then I’m happy to share, but I’ve never been worried about that.”

He attributes his own early success to a similar generosity extended by others.

“That’s probably how it began. I was a junior and I was so engaged in the design community that I think it started because people were talking about me. They were [saying], ‘Oh, David’s doing this and this’,” he says.

“I think what you give back, you’ll get back tenfold. Our work is nothing without our collaborators; they’re such a big integral part of the studio.”

Closing a chapter

As Flack Studio embarks on its second decade, with a new architecture arm of the business led by Richard Blight, it feels “almost like a different chapter” for Flack – the right time to release a milestone text.

In the process of putting it together and, quite literally, revisiting his studio’s body of work, he says he wouldn’t change anything.

“There are only some tonal shifts where I was [thinking], ‘Ooh, it’s a little brighter than I would do now’,” he admits. “But, in all honesty, I feel as if I don’t have any regrets. [It was more a case of] ‘Wow, these have really stood the test of time or they look better’. I was pleasantly surprised. I hadn’t been to some of the places for quite a few years.”

And if he went back in time, what would he tell that young Bendigo boy? “I would say ‘just stay in that cubby house’.”

Photography supplied.

Related: For more Australian interior design in print, grab the latest issue of inside magazine.