STAR TURN

In a time like no other, interior designer and adopted New Yorker Tali Roth forged ahead with the glorious re-imagining of this Chelsea brownstone for a young family.

CARLI PHILIPS

For Tali Roth, 2020 was a year of milestones: returning to her hometown of Melbourne after seven years in New York where she cultivated a thriving design business and completing her first full-scope structural and interiors project smack bang in the throes of a pandemic. A residential brownstone in Manhattan’s Chelsea, it’s one her most satisfying and cherished homes to date. “I think I’d been pigeonholed into just specifying fixtures and furniture for projects which can sometimes be a bit piecemeal. But not a lot of people know that my range extends from top to bottom.”

Her clients, husband and wife Ben and Paige Zachs, first reached out to Tali just two weeks after the designer had given birth to her baby, Romeo. “I told them to come back, but soon because I really wanted to work with them. It was a wonderful opportunity to undertake a complete overhaul. There’s great satisfaction in seeing something through the whole way, especially in these momentous times,” she says. Ben and Paige, who is the COO of direct-to-consumer paint brand Clare, had been living just a few streets away when they found the West Side duplex.

“Ben had proposed living in the suburbs for more space, especially as they had their toddler, Louis, but it was an absolute no-no for Paige. I guess it’s ‘once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker’!”