This interior designer takes three years to complete a job. Clients are happy to wait

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For David Flack, every project he takes on lasts at least three years, so clients have to be committed. “It’s a big journey,” he says.

Long before he designed dreamy pop star living rooms and hyper-cool Ace Hotel interiors, David Flack produced his 1990s magnum opus, Gumnut Plaza. As a studious country kid, 12-year-old David would lay down A3 pieces of paper on the floorboards of his family home in Bendigo. He’d design the floor plans for each store, sticky-taping together what he imagined was a cutting-edge shopping centre in regional Victoria. He still remembers tooling away on it when Princess Diana’s death was announced on the TV news one wintry day in 1997.

“Gumnut Plaza just kept on growing,” says Flack, laughing. “I did the floor plans in Texta and fine liner, and I’d do elevations and make up retail brands.”

Don’t be fooled by his penetrating blue-eyed stare in the glossy magazine spreads. Chatting at Flack Studio HQ – a century-old former electroplating workshop in Melbourne’s Fitzroy – the 40-year-old designer is warm and almost goofy. With a boyish grin and mop of grey-flecked curls, he is nothing like the pretentious artiste many expect him to be.

“People see you in a photo, just standing there not smiling, and they think you’re going to be an arsehole,” he says. “Then they meet you and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re really nice!’ I’m like, ‘Oh god, how am I appearing?’ ”

Right now? Like an international designer at the peak of his powers. Since he opened his studio a decade ago, Flack has become the king of decorative excess, influencing the design world with his distinctive more-is-more aesthetic: all tactile, layered textures, offbeat, clashing colours and eccentric contemporary art. It points to his love of Italian design: “Their use of colour, how they juxtapose materials – there’s always something a bit f---ed up about it, but it’s so beautiful,” explains Flack, who names Gio Ponti, a giant of 20th-century Italian modernism, as his design hero. “It’s clean, it’s hard-edged, it’s comfortable. It really speaks to me. But then I love, broadly, modernism, too, and elements of ’70s design.”

Take the cover image of his new book, Flack Studio: Interiors: a Melbourne terrace-house parlour with a daisy-like pendant from a 1930s Belgian cafe, burgundy rosso levanto marble fireplace, red lacquer coffee table, high-gloss green walls, antique kilim and Pierre Cardin vintage armchairs, all topped off with an alien houseplant. “If you look at that on paper, it could be a complete hot mess – and it should be technically – but it’s not,” he says. “It’s so complex, but it works.”

Amy Astley, editor-in-chief of the US magazine Architectural Digest, calls his experimental combos “material mix-mastery”. Flack has been on the magazine’s influential AD100 list five times – more than any other Australian interior designer – and Astley notes a palpably Australian sensibility in his work: “Perhaps it’s the way his homes respond so sympathetically to light and climate, or the designer’s freedom in upending received ideas from the Old World to fashion a new lexicon of design for the modern one.” Says Flack: “[Australians] travel so much because we’re so far removed. We really value external references … It’s how you string [them] all together to feel something original – and quintessentially Australian, too.”

Flack Studio currently has 35 projects spanning Australia, Asia, the US, Mexico and NZ, including Scanlan Theodore’s Miami store, Hannah St Hotel in Melbourne’s Southbank and the historic Hawthorn mansion of Andy Lee and Rebecca Harding. House flippers need not apply; Flack is out to build “forever homes” that leave a legacy. Every project takes at least three years, so clients have to be committed. “It’s a big journey,” says Flack, but he promises an end result that is uniquely them. He prides himself on intuitively creating spaces his clients didn’t even know they wanted.

The inside of the “Hilltop” homestead in rural Victoria.

Anne* and Holwell*, owners of the rural Victorian “Hilltop” homestead featured in the book, loved their “Flackified” weekender so much, the couple have re-engaged him to overhaul their Melbourne apartment. “Beauty is quite addictive,” says Holwell, “and it’s so calming living in almost an artwork.” Anne says she was instantly won over by Flack’s charm, flexibility and mismatched socks. For site visits, he’d invariably turn up with his spoodles, Frank and Alfred, and a bag of pastries. “He never comes anywhere empty-handed,” says Anne. “He has this way of making you feel like you’re his favourite – you’re his friend. He has a great sense of humour and some killer one-liners.”

Similarly, Des* and David*, who own the Sydney Darling Point property in the book, wax lyrical about Flack’s lovability, but also his calm, can-do attitude. Every client I speak to mentions (multiple times) his seeming lack of ego. Wearing a hiking headlamp, Flack recently spent hours fossicking though an antique warehouse for a San Francisco client. Of course, that kind of service comes at a cost; according to Flack, “a million bucks minimum for furniture”. Then there are paintings and sculptures; Flack has a stable of Australian artists he supports, including both Nell and Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran. “He calls it the zhuzh budget,” says David. The final bill for the Darling Point renovation blew out by 30 per cent, but you won’t hear any complaints. “He’s very good at giving you options, but it’s very hard to say no to David,” says Des. “He turned our house into a home.”

The only (mildly) disgruntled clients seem to be his parents, Judi and Geoff Flack. After all the father-son argy-bargies that accompanied their 2015 build in Bendigo, Judi says she’d never work with her son again. “I was like the meat in the sandwich,” says Judi, with a laugh.

“Judi and I did our own design, then he just bloody scrapped it and came up with another one!” adds Geoff, a retired builder who had his own Bendigo construction business for 40 years. “I said to him, ‘David, you can draw whatever you want, but I haven’t got the money to pay for the way you want to do it.’ ”

Geoff and Judi aren’t remotely surprised by their youngest child’s success. Geoff built five-year-old David a cubbyhouse, and he used to spend hours creating different worlds: a florist one week, a bakery the next. His older brother and sister were into footy and basketball, but David insisted on skipping their games to go to Grandma’s place instead. “We’d cook and do craft,” he recalls. “We’d pull the egg out of the shell and draw faces. I was always doing something. Mum would be like, ‘God, you’re relentless!’ ”

Flack says his diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder two years ago made total sense. Transcribe his words and they can seem like a tumble of half-finished thoughts and fractured sentences, as if his mind is churning out ideas faster than his mouth can articulate them. But Flack excelled academically. At primary school, he was teased for his weight, but at high school the bullies took aim at his sexuality. “One particular boy used to give him hell – and he’s turned out to be gay,” says Judi. “He’s since apologised.”

Flack’s parents were always in his corner: Judi wrote letters to get him out of PE and they were both crushed when other kids shamed 12-year-old David into abandoning his beloved cubby. When he threw away his Gumnut Plaza plans, Geoff salvaged them from the bin.

A “Flackified” sitting room in a home in Elwood, Melbourne.

To his disbelief, Flack went on to dux Bendigo’s then Catholic College and was accepted into interior design at RMIT, but dropped out after a few months, feeling out of place in Melbourne. “It was just too overwhelming,” says Flack, who hadn’t grown up around art. “I felt like I wasn’t cool enough.” Back then, he was drawn to other arrivals from the country: kids who shared his “weird sort of approachability or a bit of a dagginess”. Later that year, aged 19, Flack came out and life began.

He took a two-year detour to study business marketing but ended up back in interior design, graduating in 2009 from Swinburne and nabbing his first design job with Kerry Phelan’s KPDO, after she’d defected from Hecker Phelan & Guthrie (where Flack had interned). It wasn’t long after the global financial crisis and Flack says he was a dogsbody earning $40,000, but he was thrilled to be Phelan’s protégé – he calls her “a technical master”. She gave him the first of his 1200 or so design books, Gio Ponti, and taught him lessons he’s never forgotten, like never to question a client’s need for a $4000 tap.

“We do operate in another world,” says Flack. “But quality is quality, isn’t it? It’s not obnoxiously spending money for the sake of it; it’s about creating something so f---ing amazing that you’ll never have to rip it out.”

After four years with Phelan, he struck out on his own. Flack only alludes to “a little bit of a tizz thing” when he left – and Phelan did not respond to Good Weekend’s requests for an interview – but, whatever happened, Geoff says the move was good for his son. “He gave notice and just went like a bloody dog off a leash, hammer and tongs into it, working for himself,” says Geoff. “He had the drive and the go.”

He also cultivated great relationships with suppliers – his version of the old school tie. They talked him up to customers and jobs started coming his way. Flack Studio launched in 2014 and the buzz soon followed. The haters did, too. “It was a bit of tall poppy [syndrome],” says Flack. “I was like, ‘Just you wait, I’ll prove you all wrong’, because there’s only so far smoke and mirrors can take you.”

The pivotal point came when Flack revamped pop singer Troye Sivan’s former Carlton brick-factory home and the project went viral in 2021; the Architectural Digest video tour has clocked up more than 10 million views. Flack landed on the global stage, and less than a year later he was back in the news with Sydney’s Ace Hotel. It was a winning one-two punch.

Now with a team of 20, an architectural arm and a lighting product line, his star continues to rise. Still, he wants Flack Studio to be accessible, an antidote to the seemingly “mean and vacuous” design world he first encountered. He opens up his library to the public bi-monthly and exhibits works from up-and-coming artists at his studio.

His personal life appears to be flourishing, too. Flack and marketing exec Jason Olive eloped to New York almost two years ago and married in snowy Central Park wearing matching tuxedoes and Tessa Blazey-designed wedding rings. “It just felt right from the beginning,” says Flack, who sports a Cartier “Juste un Clou” (nail) earring that Olive gave him for his 40th. “There’s this sense of calm with him.” The couple have just moved into a Princes Hill freestanding terrace ripe for renovation, and Flack has already started slapping test colours on the walls.

Under a huge Sydney Ball abstract in the studio’s meeting room, Flack chats with Good Weekend for more than double our allotted time, then sees me to the front door, explaining every artwork along the way – including one I mistake for the office vacuum cleaner hanging on the wall. Flack laughs. The Bendigo boy in him seems to know it’s nonsensical, but the international designer delights in the absurdity.

Perhaps those twin selves are his superpower: David Flack knows who he is and where he comes from, and “authenticity” – that overused word – is irresistible. So is talent. From Gumnut Plaza to penthouse glamour … who wouldn’t want a piece of his wild, beautiful world?

* Surnames have been withheld.

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