Alex Kelly leans back in a worn out, ornate armchair. Found in any yiayia’s house, it’s the kind kept in the special living room, reserved exclusively for guests.
The chairs are part of Stubborn House, an art installation in Sydney which evokes a very specific look: the diaspora grandparent home.
“I think this aesthetic, whatever you want to call it, is completely underrepresented,” Kelly says. “This was our grandparents’ and parents’ attempts to build a place that reconciles the loss of the motherland with the adoption of the fatherland.”
“It’s just fucking beautiful. I think the doilies are beautiful, the pillars, the red bricks, the pebbles, the concrete. They are all beautiful and deserve celebrating.”
Kelly, through his Sydney restaurant, Baba’s Place, has sponsored the installation.
Stubborn House’s style is rooted in Australia’s waves of postwar migration from southern and eastern Europe, as well as the Middle East, south-east Asia and north Africa. Intricate and maximalist, these homes are the bridges between the migrant and the diaspora. They are monuments to memories, with walls covered in black and white photos and cabinets filled with old, delicate glassware.
As much as they can, they resemble homes in Lebanon, Greece, Italy or Egypt. These efforts to create safe spaces in a new country have produced a distinctive aesthetic in Australia.
Now, the look is threatened on several fronts: by suburban densification and gentrification resulting in some of these homes being demolished or renovated, and by fast furniture and modern design’s insistent diktat that less is usually more.
But the artist behind Stubborn House, Gabriella Lo Presti, says this diaspora aesthetic shouldn’t be dismissed as kitsch, outdated or “lowbrow”.
She sourced wooden doors with frosted glass, Persian rugs, freestanding Tuscan columns and yards of synthetic lace curtains for the show, the last of which she draped over wrought iron fences.
“There is something really beautiful about people being proud of their homes, of skilled migrants building beautiful houses in their image,” she says.
“These are sanctuaries away from the everyday of Australian life and aesthetics, where these families could be themselves.”
Lo Presti says migrant stories and design choices reflect the cultural history of Sydney. “I think it’s about time this look is being valued, and that there are conversations on how to preserve it.”
Down in Melbourne, similar efforts are under way to preserve and honour migrant home builders’ contributions.
Mete Erdoğan and his partner, Georgia Frances King, are restoring a 70s-style federation house (lovingly nicknamed “Shag Manor”) in Melbourne’s north and documenting the process on Instagram.
They are making meticulous efforts to ensure the restoration honours the legacy of migrants - preserving a home that was partly inspired by a homeland, and partly very Australian.
They call the look “Fedeterranean”, a mix of federation and Mediterranean, with Erdoğan saying he is keen to maintain “remnants” of his culture and upbringing.
“My parents are Turkish-Cypriot immigrants, and I grew up visiting aunts, uncles and grandparent homes that look a lot like this.”
“That’s what gives it that really specific look, that combination of elements. We want to pay respect to the materials and attention to detail that people put into building their homes.”
Erdoğan admires his forebears’ sense of quality. “Our grandparents ultimately felt these were beautiful spaces; they brought over so much of themselves, and it’s important we recognise these things.”
This process of restoration and production is described by Prof Mirjana Lozanovska, from Deakin University, as an “immense and profound” act of agency.
“These kinds of interpretations … really shift the narrative,” she says.
Lozanovska says the process of defining a style both produced a new Australian identity, while honouring the efforts and journeys of the migrants that created it.
“[These migrants] came and lived together, where rent was cheap, and built a new kind of street aesthetic, with larger windows and grape vines or lemon trees.”
Younger generations, however, adopt these design choices out of a sense of nostalgia for their grandparents, rather than memorialising the homeland.
Lozanovska says Baba’s Place, Stubborn House and Shag Manor all share and celebrate this specifically Australian aesthetic.
“They are not looking beyond Australia to a homeland, which is very significant. They are writing their own histories, their own backgrounds.”
Back in Sydney’s Marrickville, at Baba’s Place there are vitrines filled with trinkets and rugs hung on walls, alongside photographs and maps of eastern European and Middle Eastern countries.
“They are new and inventive,” Kelly says of the homes that inspired his restaurant’s decor. “And to us diaspora kids, this look represents something stable and comfortable. These were the homes we grew up in.”
The restaurant’s food and setting is cross-diasporic. It is not focused on singular thinking about culinary or cultural heritage, bound to a particular “homeland”.
This isn’t a Middle Eastern restaurant or a Balkan restaurant. Nor were the installations in Stubborn House rooted in one community or ethnic identity.
Instead, Kelly and his contemporaries recognise that the act of migration forges creation: “We are trying to show those spaces respect, as well as showing who we are.”
