Life in Colour with Appetite for Decoration
Rebecca Jamieson Dwyer visits Appetite for Decoration – a maximalist homewares and accessories wonderland in Noosaville celebrating the beauty and energy of all things colourful, patterned and handmade.
Sculptural baskets; hand-painted abstract art; jewellery in organic forms; geometric ceramics; printed tablewares; a rack bursting with vintage fashion from across the globe – walking into the Appetite for Decoration showroom and store is an absolute feast for the senses.
Founder Bettina McILwraith – a self-proclaimed ‘maximalist’, who takes joy from being surrounded by colour and print – has designed and curated an eclectic smorgasbord of wares that all have one thing in common: each piece has been crafted by human hands.
“I love celebrating craftsmanship and objects that are imbued with ritual,” Bettina explains. “Everything around us has energy – and there’s a special energy to an item that’s been made by hand.”
Working as a fashion buyer in the early 2000s, Bettina fell in love with the way independent Australian labels, such as Easton Pearson and Akira, incorporated handmade elements from global artisans into their clothing and textiles.
She was inspired to start Appetite for Decoration in London in 2008, travelling to Kenya soon afterwards to work for a Swedish fashion label where she built close relationships with communities of female makers and began to truly understand and appreciate their craft.
A few years later, she found herself in Ghana working for a Sydney-based charity So They Can, again liaising closely with female artisans, which led her to begin designing and developing her own products that combined her innate design eye with the textural beauty of African handcrafts.
Her Appetite for Decoration showroom and store, tucked away in the bustling Project Avenue Industrial Estate in Noosaville, features objects from Australia and around the world – including homegrown pieces from Eumundi-based abstract artist Amy Clarke, Noosa-based plein air artist Rosie Lloyd Giblett, Victorian ceramicist Milly Dent and Brisbane-based Mooskin Jewellery – but it’s sharing the skills of the craftspeople she works with in Africa that truly fills Bettina’s cup.
“I wanted to showcase and celebrate the artisans I’d worked with personally, and give them a home and a voice in Australia,” she says. “Most of the products here I’ve helped design or
have worked closely to develop with communities on the ground.”
One of these projects is Bettina’s Material Futures range – a series of tufted baskets hand-woven by Ghanaian social enterprise, Baba Tree Baskets, which incorporate indigo-dyed fragments of waste textiles – both as a comment on the global problem of textile waste resulting from fast fashion and a one-of-a-kind design statement.
“There’s a huge problem in Ghana with the dumping of textiles from around the world, so this was a bit of an ode to that,” Bettina explains.
Each basket has transformed something that was once viewed as trash into an elevated treasure that wouldn’t look out of place in an art gallery or high-end hotel.
“We’ve used both calico curtains and old cotton t-shirts in these pieces, and they give each basket such a distinct personality,” she adds.
Bettina has always been drawn to textural pieces – baskets, fabrics, artworks, homewares, clothing – and believes that surrounding ourselves with real, textured items can help ground us in the slick, filtered, increasingly online world we live in.
“I think texture really adds to that sense of something being made by hand,” she says. “Our mobile phone screens are shiny so the antidote to that is something that’s highly textured; something that has life in it.”
As well as being a stunning space to browse for unique gifts, beautiful jewellery, statement homewares and highly curated vintage pieces, Appetite for Decoration will be hosting a diverse series of workshops throughout January 2024, including embroidery, sound healing, textile upcycling and more.
“People come to me with ideas and I provide the space for the community to come together,” Bettina says.
For Bettina, supporting female artisans through slow design and paying a fair wage to help improve their lives is the driving force behind her business.
“Many of them just want to be able to pay to send their children to school,” she says. “They dream that their children will get an education and that will lift them out of poverty. Being welcomed into their houses and their lives is definitely the most special part for me.”
She also hopes that all the products stocked by Appetite for Decoration stand on design merit, and are beautiful in their own right, even if you’re not aware of their ethical credentials.
“That’s why I have a showroom – there’s an energy to these pieces that is palpable,” she says. “There’s a community in Mali that creates these incredible mud-dyed wall hangings we stock, and they have this beautiful quote: ‘What’s made in harmony with the earth, brings harmony to the home.’ There’s beauty and harmony to these pieces because they’re made with the intention of being good for people and the planet, even if you don’t know the story behind their creation.”
As someone who grew up in a pink house filled with prints, patterns and clashing colours, it’s perhaps no surprise that Bettina loves to surround herself – both in work and in life – with bright and beautiful hues.
“Everything in the store sits in colour, and that’s really important to me,” she says. “Colour brings energy, it brings joy. We can’t help but be drawn to it.”
