Susan Caudry is the estate director at Domaine Chandon and believes that great wine and great design have a lot in common.

Pivoting to the wine industry over two decades ago following an early career in fashion at Vogue Australia, Caudry led the Chandon Australia winery for six years before heading overseas. A four-year period as estate director at Chandon California ended when she returned to Chandon Australia in the same role.

Located on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country, Chandon produces sparkling wines with fruit sourced from some of Australia’s most notable vineyards, not just in the Yarra Valley, but also from estate vineyards in the Strathbogie Ranges and the Whitlands High Plateau.

While her days may be steeped in sparklings, Caudry’s love for design has remained undiminished throughout her career. And she sees parallels between the way the hospitality industry has evolved in Australia and the way the A+D sector has. “I think in the last 10 to 20 years, Australia’s matured in the same way that we did with food and wine in earlier generations,” she says. “We have felt more comfortable in our own skin with our own design, rather than being derivative of something else. Whether that’s local pride or whether it’s due to really great champions and advocates, or the best of the talent not going and hunting for jobs overseas and staying at home, I don’t know.

“I’d love to know the reason for it, but for me there’s a degree of localisation that feels comfortable.”

She adds, “If I liken it to wine – which is what I’ll always do, because it’s what I know – it’s that with wine everyone wants to know where it came from and who made it. In design terms, for want of a better description, it’s materials. So, it’s the grapes and the location of the grapes. ‘Is it Chardonnay or Pinot?’ ‘And where did it come from?’ ‘The Yarra Valley or Margaret River?’ ‘And what do I know about those places?’ There’s such a strong relationship to provenance in wine.”

Caudry believes that Australian design is regarded in a similar fashion, and at the same time as electing to stay at home rather than move overseas to chase work, our designers have realised that the country offers endless resources of unique and glorious materials. And you can see that just by stepping outside. 

“There’s a corresponding sophistication that Australians have grown over time,” she says, “and I use ‘sophistication’ in the true sense of the word, meaning a recognition of our own places as being very beautiful.”

For Caudry personally, the natural environment is what inspires her and replenishes her energy on a daily basis. “Recently I was having a fairly shabby day and I walked over to a lookout and looked at the ocean. I was pummelled by the wind for about 10 or 15 minutes until I was so cold I had to leave, and that was it.”

Refurbishing the winery

When it came to redesigning the Chandon Winery, Caudry took this feeling to heart. “I look to the Yarra Ranges over the vineyard, I see how it changes day by day. It’s literally layered from an elevation viewpoint,” she says. “It’s our firmly held view that we have the best perspective of any visitor centre in the Yarra Valley and it was designed that way.”

She explains how the estate’s founder, Dr Tony Jordan, arrived on the site in the mid 1980s when it was not much more than a ramshackle farm, but one with a “phenomenal diversity of terroir”.

When it came to creating a remaster plan of the site, the team brainstormed around the idea of what they would do if they had a completely clean slate. But some decisions were unanimous. “The one thing we would never change is the hospitality and that connectivity to nature that people experience here,” says Caudry.

Instead, the response was to refurbish rather than gut and renovate the existing premises in late 2024. “We can’t date it exactly, but we believe the homestead itself is from around 1880,” she says. “And it’s still standing! So we worked with what was available to us. We didn’t change the footprint.”

Just as they do with the sparklings they produce, the team focused their efforts on using  local materials and the best ones available.

“Right from the start we wanted to emphasise care and craftsmanship,” says Caudry. “We wanted to bring forward the story of local craftspeople. We have a list of 30-odd designers, makers and artists who are installed in that space from painters like Kate Tucker through to Anna Varendorff, for example, or Jordan Fleming and Daniel Boddam.

“It was a curation exercise as much as it was a design exercise.”

Four or five pieces from mainly Victorian craftspeople were commissioned specifically for the space along with a few harder to source international pieces. The landscaping was courtesy of Simone Bliss of SBLA Studio. 

Caudry worked on the fitout with creative director Jennifer Cranston, with whom she had also worked on the Chandon winery in California, and Melbourne-based designer Melanie Beynon. 

“Jenn’s done work across our brand at various locations, but also at a more creative level. She has beautiful taste is what I would say, and Melanie really landed it,” says Caudry.

The final results again tie into those connections Caudry sees between wine and design, particularly when it comes to how relationships with designers evolve over the years. “It all depends on the personality, doesn’t it? Working in wine, you are accustomed to having long-term relationships with people. Quite often you’ve got growers that are partners with you for years. There’s a sense that it takes us a long time to do things, and we like to have long and enduring relationships with our collaborators too.”

And, after the refurbishment of the Chandon space, what’s Caudry’s favourite element of the design? “It has some curiosity, but it’s been designed for being comfortable,” she says. “And when people come in, it’s a brand home. We want them to be energised and intrigued and at home. And it does have that response. People who’ve been here before know what the transformation is and those who’ve never been here before look at it and go, ‘This is fantastic. I love it’.”

Photos: Supplied.

For more information about Chandon visit the website.