Ma Vie en Rose

Stepping into Yvonne Shafir’s singular East St Kilda home feels a bit like Alice’s journey through the Looking Glass, with each room serving as a portal to the unexpected, a space where reality is softly bent and perceptions are playfully challenged.

“I wanted to feel as if one is being embraced and surrounded by pure joy,” says the lifelong aesthete, arts patron, and Ph.D. scholar of surrealism, describing the years-long creative journey that transformed a typical Spanish mission-style house into a work of art in its own right. “Here, there are stories within stories, and all of the elements were designed to be in a dialogue with each other,” explains Shafir, who painstakingly harmonized the home’s endlessly diverse aesthetic threads: three-dimensional avant-garde art pieces, 1930s modernist furniture, campy knick-knacks collected on overseas adventures and slick European lighting fixtures.

Against all odds, it works marvelously, an exuberant pastiche of rooms and spaces united by the luxuriant use of pink throughout, on display everywhere from the plush upholstery in the sitting room to the painted pool deck out back.

As the home took shape, Shafir, known for her unerring eye and penchant for the campy, the otherworldly and sometimes shocking, commissioned several contemporary artists to create custom works for the project - they aren't just decorative, but conversations materialized, offering insights into Shafir’s vibrant network of creative minds and her belief in the transformative power of art. Taken together, it’s a story of not just a home, but of a life joyfully lived, a pink-hued proclamation.

One of my favourite pink moments was in India at a store entrance, which looked like a little pink cave with a pink neon sign. It was like being in a pink bath. My living room has a pink neon sign, and when I turn it on, the whole room glows like a giant pink box. It's delightful.

I bought my house about seven years ago. I was looking for a mid-century modern and ended up with a Spanish Mission that was kitted out with lime green carpet and white walls.

The big ticket features were the swimming pool and kitchen dining booth, both of which I have retained, albeit reupholstering the booth. Everything else has been redone.

It is modeled on a swimming pool by César Manrique, an artist and architect living on Lanzarote, a volcanic Spanish island off the coast of Africa. A couple of years ago, I went on a “poolgrimage” to the original site and can report back that my East St Kilda pool is a remarkable reproduction.

As my interiors became more maximalist, the garden aesthetic became more of a jungle theme! Overgrown, chaotic, flourishing, and abundant. Strong colours merged with shadowy ones, and objects and artworks piled up.

A friend in Mexico told me that everyone was putting vintage Japanese rubber toys in their pot plants. I couldn’t easily source Japanese ones, but I found serious stashes of vintage Soviet toys in the Etsy Ukraine store. I bought up big. And then the war broke out, and I started receiving boxes of little rubber Ukrainian refugee dogs, pussycats and gnomes—poignant and heartbreaking mementos from a world at war.

Some of the gallerists—yes, I say, some—but those I have connected with are people whose intelligence, compassion, guidance, humanity, commitment, humour, generosity, and true friendship I deeply cherish. Yes, that’s a lot of adjectives—a lot of qualities. They can also be nudniks who want you to buy more, but I do have the power of veto.

I’ve also had the privilege of meeting with a number of art conservators. The Tabrizi painting, for example, was victim to an accident involving my late father’s hospital bed that was being delivered. (Don’t ask). I have a lot of adjectives for this group, too, but I'll stick to just brilliant, dedicated and quirky.

But connections are also deliberate and cultivated. I have befriended a number of the artists in my collection. It is my greatest joy, really. How great it is to be invited into someone else’s imaginary world, to pierce through the mirror of representation and have a mirror thrown back to oneself. I have had the most extraordinary exchanges with some of these creators, being allowed to explore and examine the best and worst parts of myself. It is an honour and a privilege. 

I also want to acknowledge all the many frame shops I’ve used. I’ve had so many discussions with people in these stores about how I want things to look and how the art should present. These, too, are invaluable parts of my process.

My connections with a number of total legends—the men (and yes, they have been men, strangely) who have had the patience to return time and again to hang and rehang my work. Even the process of hanging and placing works demands a concerted vision between my ideas and theirs, prescribed by the works themselves. Incredible feats of bravery have sometimes been required.

The painters and wallpaperers who have also brought the integrated vision of artwork and environment to life. A special mention to angry Eddie, whose swearing during the most delicate of tasks (such as the leopard spots on the living room ceiling) is without compare.

Lastly, it is about the connections between the works themselves, and this is where I come in to play Grand Wizard. Often, unsolicited, the works create their own dialogue. Suddenly, I see the angle or shape of something in one work reproduced in a completely different artist or genre. Does this mean they have to sit side by side in a composition? No, though practicality does not always come into it*

When all the pieces marry up, and this can take years of rehanging, repainting, reimagining, a certain chemistry comes into play. My last apartment in New York’s Upper East Side was brightly painted. The color scheme did not fool the Feng Shui expert I hired, feeling that something was “off.” The meeting was challenging. It seemed that the whole Upper East Side of Manhattan had some of the worst energy on the planet. As she made her way through the lurid hues, she turned around and yelled at me: “You, you ice cube!”. And she was right! I was miserable. So disconnected. I was drinking way too much and was still in the closet. Half my social life was hidden away, and half my private life was on full display. Today, this is no longer true.

Because I'm at home with myself, my home is at home with itself. Seated at my turquoise-y kitchen booth, eating her delicious brownies, looking out into the garden and pool under my pink ceiling, a friend on her first visit burst into tears. “I feel so comfortable here,” she opined. The warm colours embrace and welcome. The textures and repeated motifs, though busy to some, are comforting. It has taken work. Both on myself and on my home!