Getting to Know Decus Interiors

Our editor-in-chief recently spoke with Alexandra Donohoe Church, founder of Sydney-based Decus Interiors, to find out more about her journey and how she realised her passion for residential design

It was during a lecture at UNSW that Alexandra Donohoe Church had a physical and spiritual awakening about her future career path. Halfway through her first year, she’d fallen asleep on her desk during a horticulture lecture, in full view of the tutor who was delivering it as part of the landscape design course she was enrolled in. It was that moment that helped Donohoe Church realise she was probably better suited to another subject, and so she promptly transferred to an interior architecture degree. Given that the discipline was relatively new at the time, most of her lecturers were architects, ‘primarily concerned with form, space and volume’, as she explains. While she appreciated their expertise, she recalls that ‘there was a real pushback in terms of texture, materiality, colour and decoration’ — something many interior designers trained by architects can relate to — adding with a laugh that ‘anything decorative was perceived to be inherently evil’. This proved to be a challenge for the budding designer as she began to realise that she definitely gravitated towards that end of the design spectrum.

After graduation, Donohoe Church started her career with a five year stint at SJB before moving to Bates Smart, where she worked under Dana Tomic Hughes (founder of online design magazine Yellowtrace) for three years. She then joined Sarah Davison Interiors, taking over from Juliette Arent who left to co-found Arent&Pyke. It was while working in Davison’s studio that Donohoe Church was involved in her first residential project. She immediately fell in love with the process, the inherently personal nature of designing a private home and the smaller, more intimate exchanges that facilitate such projects.

A few years later, while working at another firm, the global financial crisis hit and Donohoe Church was made redundant, giving her the push to go out on her own and found Decus Interiors. Her first solo project was a private home designed in collaboration with Luigi Rosselli Architects, a partnership that has continued to this day. In the years since, Decus Interiors has grown to a team of twelve, which Donohoe Church insists is as big as they’ll get since she wants to stay as involved with clients and projects as possible.

The small firm is intentionally focused on residential projects for now. Donohoe Church says her interests lie in the ‘inherently individual’. While there’s clearly a common thread that ties each of Decus’s projects together, rather than prescribe a strict aesthetic she says they leave their egos at the door and instead tease out what their clients really want from their homes, putting their enjoyment of the space as the ultimate goal.

Stewarding her studio through this latest global crisis has given Donohoe Church pause to think about how to use the downtime most productively. The answer is Decus Academy, a weekly zoom tutorial on a variety of topics, designed to keep her team inspired and at the top of their game. And with some space in the studio’s schedule, the newest project to hit the drafting boards is much closer to home, and surely the most rewarding, Donohoe Church’s own residence.

Words / Suzy Annetta
Images / Portrait by Prue Ruscoe, other images by Anson Smart