Photography: Fiona Susanto | Styling: Maria Papantoniou
The first time Naomi Tosic saw the three-storey former hat factory that would come to be her favourite place on Earth, she felt the endless possibilities ahead. “It was less about the home and more about what Boris could do with it,” she says of her beloved late husband.
Tucked into a Paddington laneway, the warehouse studio had enjoyed a rich previous life as a space for art and ‘happenings’, run by gallerist Robin Gibson, who whitewashed the brick walls and filled the rooms with works by artists such as Brett Whiteley – to the delight of Sydney’s 1970s art scene, who turned up for its edgy openings and wild parties.
When the Tosic family moved in at Christmas 2018, it was to a very different reality. “We had no kitchen,” Naomi recalls. “All I had was a trestle table, the barbecue upstairs, a microwave and a Thermomix. I remember squatting on the floor with a pressure cooker making osso buco, but we did serve it on beautiful plates!”
The kitchen may have been nonexistent, but the building’s dimensions were good: 16 metres long and eight metres wide with four metre ceilings over the three floors. Two more floors were added to accommodate a car stacker in the basement plus a rooftop pool, outdoor kitchen and undercover dining.
The most striking element of this extraordinary home, spread over its eventual five floors, is the rich cocoon of thoughtful, detailed joinery. That’s the big design thread throughout, reaching from the garage storage spaces in the basement and customised Nohrd gym, through to the bedrooms and their wardrobe bays, as well as living spaces with bespoke credenzas and a kitchen that is Boris Tosic’s homage to his two great loves: timber… and Naomi.
“This house describes my husband. It is striking and sensual and masculine and, you know, robust too. It was a love letter to me – something he built for me,” she says of this residential masterpiece. “I am just now appreciating the refinement of Boris’s taste and the deliberateness of his choices. Everyone always said he was a force, so sure in terms of his clear singular vision, and what creates a house like this is so many precise decisions. It’s like this is a canvas and it’s his artwork.”
Boris was a timber master and his business, Élan Construct, still collaborates with architects and designers and is the top pick for high-end joinery and timber furniture in Australia. He had a special appreciation for mid-century design and spent 30 years dreaming of his perfect home. He taught himself how to rebuild the sash windows running the length of the building, then turned to mastering the property’s steelwork exoskeleton.“I think it was a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of steel just to meet regulations,” explains Naomi.
In 2020, Boris was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and Naomi cared for him at home until January 2023. “This house has been phenomenal for functionality for our family and to care for Boris. I spent two years here and it was heaven, to just sit and look out over the rooftops – it feels a bit like Paris. We didn’t need the world and we were like castaways in this house. I imagined pulling up the drawbridge to bunker down from the siege. And now we’re in the reality of needing to change, because this house doesn’t make sense without Boris.”
So, it looks like an inner-west adventure for Naomi and her boys, sons Quinn and Mali. The search is now a reality because Naomi and Boris’s house has just sold. What stays and what goes is yet to be determined, but the family who are the new owners have already reached out to Naomi to say they’d like to continue the design integrity of the Tosic House.
It’s a poignant moment, she says. “I don’t know if these things are transferable. Maybe if I took the lights out and put them in some other house, it would make me sadder rather than happier. It’s painful to downsize, and it can feel like a bit of a life reversal.
We’ve had the luxury of living in 400 square metres, so you end up filling it with stuff. And I can’t let stuff dictate what I can and can’t do. It’s a universal lesson to just let go. It feels like the house owns these pieces in a way – and I don’t need to take 50 wine glasses to my next house. I think 12 will do me nicely. That’s what happens, people get divorced, people die and these beautiful assets get split.”
What will she take with them? The boys’ blue sofa from the cinema room is a definite, maybe the Bill Hensons in the bedroom (if she can find a wall strong enough to hold them), her cookbooks and the Robyn Cosgrove rug from the living room. “Just so much feels like it belongs to the DNA of the house,” she says. Anything else may end up at Shapiro Auctioneers.
“Part of me is like, ‘I must hold onto this legacy of my husband and honour him!’ And then I hear his voice going, ‘Sell it all!’ I think Boris could have walked out of it fully furnished and started again. It’s devastating, but he got to achieve what he’d wanted. He did it. And I think that is brilliant.”
The Design Team
Elan: elanc.com; @elan.joinery
Nohrd: nohrd.com
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