Prints work by Karen Walker

Fashion designer Karen Walker's latest move is into homeware, specifically a collaboration with the Australian department store Myer to produce a new range of homeware using popular prints. Here's our Q+A with Karen from our current issue, along with some extra images from her homeware range. A word of warning before you get too purchase-ready - while the towels are available in Karen Walker stores, the rest of the range is available only in Myer's Australian stores (and they don't sell online at the moment). 

Karen Walker

HOME You've already developed Karen Walker paint, jewellery and eyewear. Why homeware?

KAREN WALKER We've been interested in developing homeware for some time, and the opportunity came along to create a line in partnership with the right people [Australian department store Myer] at the right time. We've been working with Myer for years, and they approached us to bring our look into homeware.

The images on these mugs also feature in Karen Walker's jewellery collection

How did you choose which prints to use? 

After showing internationally for 20 seasons, we've built up quite an extensive archive of prints, which is where we looked first when creating graphics for bed linen, towels and so on. We made a selection of prints for each category and played around with color and sizing, then sampled what we liked and narrowed it down from there. There are many prints in our archive that we're constantly reworking and reissuing in different ways, whether it be fabric print, fine jewellery or eyewear. Much within our archive has become iconic for us and is reinvented again and again. Homeware gave us another area in which to explore this. We'll be creating new homeware ranges every six months, and they'll always have print and colour as their starting point.

 This range of beach towels will be available in Karen Walker's New Zealand boutiques from spring

When will New Zealand shoppers be able to get their hands on the goods?

The beach towels will be in Karen Walker stores here in spring. The rest of the range can be purchased at Myer's Australian stores from August.

The homeware range also includes these bed linens

Fashionable interiors

Our next issue, which we've just sent to press, is our annual focus on the connections between fashion and home design.

One of the things we think New Zealand homes could do with more of is colour, so for this issue of the magazine our stylists Tanya Wong and Jessica Allen decided to do a shoot that took its colour cues from the catwalks.

We wanted the colours to be really strong and graphic, as evidenced by some of the flats we used on set in the image above. Coincidentally (we planned the shoot before this happened) there appeared to be a lot of this bold, block colour on the catwalks at the recent Milan Fashion Week.

Tanya and Jess sourced clothes, art and furniture, chose a colour scheme to suit each of the four scenarios, and then designed sets for our shoot in photographer Toaki Okano's studio. Here are some behind-the-scenes pics from their shoot. Here, Toaki shoots the green-and-yellow setup, with a Kate Sylvester dress on the mannequin and a photograph by Richard Maloy on the wall:

Here's Toaki in the blue-and-pink setup, with a photograph by Anne Noble on the blue wall, and a dress by Karen Walker:

And there's the first spread of the final result in the magazine (somehow the colours on this JPEG don't look as vivid as they do in the final printed result, but you'll get the idea). The issue is on sale on October 11. Thanks to Resene for helping us out with the shoot - all the colours are from Resene The Range 2011/12. And well done to Tanya, Jess and Toaki for creating such a great series of images.

Fashion and architecture

You may or may not care, but this week is Fashion Week, so here at ACP headquarters (the home of Fashion Quarterly, and other fashion-obsessed magazines) there has been a great kerfuffle about who's scored tickets to which designer's show, and so on.

Here at HOME New Zealand, we cannot claim to be above the fray. In our next issue, which we're just sending to the printers today (and will be on sale Monday October 5), we've asked 11 New Zealand fashion designers to choose their favourite buildings.

Kate Sylvester (shown below) chose a home designed by Stevens Lawson Architects that won our Home of the Year award in 2007. The photograph is by Mark Smith.





The surprising thing was how many of the other designers - who include Karen Walker, Trelise Cooper, Beth Ellery and Alexandra Owen - chose historic buildings as their favourites. We presumed that these of-the-moment designers would be obsessed with contemporary structures. Then we wondered if timelessness actually stems from a design being of its time, rather than trying to stand apart from it.


You can check out the other designers' choices when our October November issue comes out. We hope you enjoy them.