Introducing marie claire Lifestyle‘s latest cover star, Nina Maya, an interior designer with a runway-to-hallway trajectory. With a background in fashion, and a foothold as Australia’s queen of luxury neutral interiors, there was surely no better person to help our haute homes issue. Here we take a peek inside her home, which is featured in the issue.
Nina Maya loves a neutral. In her wardrobe, on her skin and in her weekender on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Granted, all of the celebrated interior designer’s projects are havens of non-colour, but this beach house takes
her signature palette to the resort, via the pool, firepit and outdoor bathroom.
During the week Maya lives in an equally stylish, swoon-worthy haven in Sydney’s Paddington. This house is their weekend escape. In the Nina Maya universe, home and wardrobe are one. Of course, there’s the well-versed love of neutral dressing. Then there’s a lot of attention paid to accessories and fine jewellery, like the Van Cleef & Arpels pieces on her wrist and neck. It’s an approach that extends to interiors. “I see lighting as the jewellery and artworks as the accessories,” she says. “They are definitely worthwhile investing in. They are the things we get enjoyment from over and over again but we can change them.”
If anyone can attest to the intersection of fashion and interiors it has to be Maya. Before starting her design firm she cut her teeth at Italian fashion house Grazia Bagnaresi, and then for six years ran her own fashion label, which was worn by the likes of Cate Blanchett.
Maya didn’t want the holiday house to be defined by its location. “We wanted it to feel like you could be anywhere in the world,” she says. “I like the idea of an interior that can’t quite be placed.”
Here, the lighting and furniture are mostly all designed by Maya and made by craftspeople. Even the art is bespoke: Maya commissioned a few of her favourite artists to create one-off pieces for the house. Among them is Max Patté, Marcus Piper and Marisa Purcell. “It’s very rewarding to have one-offs from all these great artists we admire,” she says. “And I love each and every piece so much. They give me so much joy.”
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