Imagine walking into a room where the ceiling is unexpectedly yellow, one wall glows through translucent layers of color, a sculptural modern chair sits beside an antique object, and textiles from Europe or Asia appear alongside furniture by young Australian designers. Nothing is beige simply because beige is safe. Nothing has been selected merely because it matches.
Instead, the room has rhythm.
It has tension.
It has color that seems almost alive.
For Marion Hall Best, a successful interior was not simply a collection of attractive furniture. It was an entire composition made from color, light, texture, space, movement, art, and objects. At a time when much Australian interior decoration remained relatively conservative, Best introduced clients to international modernism, adventurous color combinations, contemporary furniture, experimental wall finishes, and an approach to interiors that treated rooms almost like three-dimensional paintings.
Born in Dubbo, New South Wales, on April 13, 1905, Marion Hall Best became one of Australia’s most influential interior designers of the 20th century. Her career stretched from the late 1920s through the postwar modernist boom and into the 1970s and beyond. Along the way, she helped transform interior decoration from a service commonly associated with department stores and furniture retailers into an independent professional design practice.
She also made Australian rooms considerably more colorful.
🌈 Growing Up With Color
Marion Esdaile Burkitt grew up in Dubbo as the youngest of four children. Her father, Edmond Henry Burkitt, was a doctor, while her mother, Amy Theodora Hungerford, created a home in which color made a lasting impression on her youngest daughter.
Best later developed an extraordinary sensitivity to color, but it did not emerge from a purely academic interest in theory. Color was something she experienced emotionally and spatially. It could change the apparent dimensions of a room, alter the relationship between furniture and architecture, intensify light, or create an atmosphere that could not be achieved through furnishings alone.
She attended school in Dubbo and later Frensham at Mittagong. Best initially followed a very different professional path, training as a nurse at the Coast Hospital at Little Bay.
Interior design was not yet an obvious career choice, particularly for a woman in Australia during the 1920s. The profession itself was only beginning to take recognizable form.
Best would help change that.
🎨 Art Before Interiors
During the 1920s and 1930s, Best immersed herself in Sydney’s creative circles. She studied painting and design with artist Thea Proctor and learned embroidery from June Scott Stevenson.
These experiences encouraged her to think about color, pattern, texture, and composition long before she established herself professionally as an interior designer.
Thea Proctor was particularly significant within Australian modernism. Her elegant prints, illustrations, decorative art, and sophisticated understanding of contemporary style connected Sydney to broader international developments in art and fashion.
For Best, this artistic environment offered an alternative education.
She was learning to see a room not simply as somewhere to place furniture but as a composition.
Walls could function like areas of color on a canvas.
Furniture created shape and volume.
Textiles added pattern and movement.
Lighting changed everything.
That way of seeing would eventually distinguish her interiors from the conventional decorating practices surrounding her.
🏠 Farleigh and the Beginning of a Career
Best’s first known decorating project came in 1929 when she worked on Farleigh, her mother’s house at Palm Beach.
Even at this early stage, she demonstrated the confidence with color that would become one of her trademarks. The scheme included white walls combined with yellow ceilings and furniture Best designed herself.
A yellow ceiling may not sound radical today, but the choice reveals something essential about her approach.
The ceiling did not have to disappear.
It could participate.
Best was already questioning the assumption that architectural surfaces should remain neutral while decoration occurred through curtains, rugs, furniture, and ornaments.
Color itself could shape the room.
The success of early projects led to additional private commissions and eventually increasingly significant commercial work.
What began almost informally was becoming a profession.
🏗️ Learning the Architecture of a Room
Best understood that decorating alone was not enough.
In 1938, she attended first-year architecture lectures at the University of Sydney, where the architecture program had been established under Leslie Wilkinson. She subsequently completed a New York-based correspondence course in interior decoration during 1939 and 1940.
These studies helped Best develop more professional methods of presenting her ideas, including architectural drawings and colored isometric projections.
That development was important because the modern interior designer needed to communicate with architects, tradespeople, manufacturers, and clients.
An idea could no longer exist only as a collection of fabric samples.
It needed plans.
Elevations.
Spatial relationships.
Specifications.
Best increasingly approached an interior as architecture from the inside outward.
🏙️ Seven Elizabeth Street
One of Best’s most important early commissions was the interior design of the modern apartment building at 7 Elizabeth Street in central Sydney.
The building was designed by architect Emil Sodersten, one of Australia’s significant interwar modern architects. Its compact bachelor flats represented a new form of urban living, and Best was responsible for creating interiors suited to that modern environment.
The project gave her an opportunity to work on a larger architectural scale than the private houses she had previously decorated.
Color played an important role.
The building’s original interiors included carefully coordinated finishes and striking color combinations, demonstrating that even relatively compact apartments could possess a strong visual identity.
Seven Elizabeth Street helped establish Best’s professional reputation and was widely discussed in contemporary design publications.
Her career was moving rapidly beyond informal decoration toward a fully integrated modern design practice.
🛍️ Building Marion Best Pty Ltd
Best’s entrepreneurial instincts were as important as her design talent.
In the late 1930s, she established a workroom and display area in Queen Street, Woollahra, eventually developing the operation into Marion Best Pty Ltd.
The business became much more than a conventional decorating shop.
It functioned as a point of connection between Australian clients and emerging modern design.
Visitors could encounter contemporary textiles, furniture, ceramics, glassware, wallpaper, lighting, and decorative objects that might otherwise have been difficult to find in Sydney.
Best did not simply wait for international modernism to arrive in Australia.
She went looking for it.
Then she brought it home.
🛍️ Rowe Street and Sydney’s Design Culture
In 1949, Best opened another small shop in Rowe Street in central Sydney.
Rowe Street became one of the city’s most interesting concentrations of small galleries, craft shops, fashion businesses, and design retailers. It offered something more intimate and experimental than the city’s large department stores.
Best’s shop fitted naturally into that environment.
Her retail spaces introduced visitors to ideas rather than merely selling objects. A customer might discover an unfamiliar chair, fabric, lamp, ceramic piece, or color combination and begin imagining an entirely different kind of home.
The shops therefore became part showroom, part laboratory, and part design education.
They helped expand the vocabulary available to Australian interiors.
🌍 Bringing International Modernism to Australia
One of Marion Hall Best’s greatest contributions was her ability to connect Australian design with international modernism.
Her shops eventually stocked or introduced furnishings and textiles associated with some of the most significant names in international design, including Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, Marimekko, Eero Aarnio, Danese Milano, Jim Thompson, and McGuire.
For Australian customers, access to this work mattered enormously.
Before international design could be browsed instantly online, discovering contemporary furniture from Scandinavia, Italy, Finland, the United States, or Southeast Asia required networks of importers, retailers, designers, travelers, magazines, and personal contacts.
Best became one of those essential connections.
Her interiors could therefore look cosmopolitan without simply copying a foreign showroom.
She combined imported modern furniture with Australian art, textiles, antiques, handmade objects, and pieces by local designers.
The result was eclectic but controlled.
🇦🇺 Supporting Australian Modern Design
Best’s enthusiasm for international design did not mean she ignored Australian designers.
Quite the opposite.
Her businesses stocked furniture and objects by important local figures including Gordon Andrews, Clement Meadmore, and Roger McLay, as well as printed textiles by designers such as Frances Burke and Douglas Annand.
This combination was crucial.
Modern Australian design did not develop in isolation from international movements, nor was it simply an imitation of them. Designers were responding to Bauhaus ideas, Scandinavian modernism, American industrial design, Italian furniture, Asian materials, and their own local conditions.
Best’s shops created a place where those conversations could physically occur.
An Australian-designed chair might sit near an imported textile.
A local artwork could share a room with Scandinavian-inspired furniture.
Rather than asking whether a piece was Australian or international, Best cared about whether it contributed to the space.
🌈 Color as Architecture
Color remained the element most closely associated with Marion Hall Best.
She did not think of color as something applied after the important design decisions had already been made.
Color was one of the important decisions.
A ceiling could change the apparent height of a room.
A strongly colored wall could alter the perceived depth of the space.
Contrasting colors could energize a room, while related tones could create visual continuity between architectural elements and furnishings.
Best was willing to use combinations that other decorators might have considered risky.
Strong pinks, oranges, blues, greens, yellows, reds, and purples could appear within sophisticated interiors without making them feel childish or chaotic.
The key was relationship.
Color did not work alone.
It interacted with every other color surrounding it.
✨ The Famous Glazed Walls
One of Best’s most distinctive techniques involved color glazing.
Working with painter-decorator Fred Russell and drawing inspiration from painter Justin O’Brien, Best developed wall finishes built from layers of different colors.
A color could be applied over another and then partially scraped or manipulated so that hints of the underlying tone remained visible.
The resulting surface had depth.
Instead of looking like a flat coat of conventional house paint, the wall could appear luminous and translucent, almost like shot silk or colored glass.
The technique became one of the signatures of Best’s mature interiors and was widely imitated.
This is a wonderful example of her belief that walls themselves could become active components of an interior.
A wall did not always need artwork hanging on it to become visually interesting.
Sometimes the wall was the artwork.
🩰 Learning From the Ballets Russes
Best’s use of color was also influenced by theater.
She was deeply impressed by the extraordinary stage designs associated with Colonel de Basil’s Ballets Russes companies, which toured Australia during the late 1930s and early 1940s.
The Ballets Russes brought audiences much more than dance.
Productions involved adventurous combinations of costume, color, scenery, music, movement, and visual art, frequently drawing on some of Europe’s most innovative designers and artists.
For an interior designer interested in transforming three-dimensional space, the connection was obvious.
A theatrical set had to create an entire world.
So did an interior.
The difference was that people would actually live inside Best’s compositions.
🛋️ Mixing Old and New
Modernism is sometimes imagined as an aggressive rejection of everything old.
Best’s interiors could be far more nuanced.
She might combine a modern chair with an antique piece, contemporary textiles with traditional furniture, or international design with handmade local objects.
The success depended on the relationships between them.
This gave her interiors a richness that purely doctrinaire modernism sometimes lacked.
A room did not need to resemble a furniture catalog.
It needed personality.
Best’s approach anticipated a principle that would become increasingly common in later interior design: great rooms often come from carefully controlled contrast rather than perfect matching.
Old and new can make one another more interesting.
🏥 Designing Beyond Private Homes
Although residential interiors formed an important part of Best’s career, she also worked on public and commercial spaces.
Early commissions included work connected with the Lady Gowrie Child Care Centre at Erskineville and the Rachel Forster Hospital for Women and Children in Redfern. She also designed exhibitions and interiors for clubs and other institutions.
These projects demonstrated that modern color and thoughtful interior design could influence spaces far beyond affluent private homes.
Hospitals, childcare centers, theaters, clubs, offices, and exhibitions all presented different functional requirements.
A successful designer could not simply reproduce the same attractive room over and over.
Best adapted.
Her visual confidence remained recognizable, but each project required its own solution.
🎭 The Regent Theatre in Wollongong
One of Best’s most important surviving commercial commissions is associated with the Regent Theatre in Wollongong, completed in the 1950s.
Movie theaters were ideal environments for an interior designer interested in drama.
The visitor’s experience began before the film started.
Foyers, staircases, lounges, carpets, lighting, colors, wall treatments, and furniture could transform an evening at the cinema into an event.
Best brought her characteristic modern color sensibility to the Regent’s interior.
The work later gained particular historical importance because relatively few major commercial interiors designed by Best survived intact.
The Regent Theatre eventually received recognition on the New South Wales State Heritage Register, with Best’s interiors contributing substantially to its significance.
👩🎨 Helping Create a Profession
When Marion Hall Best began decorating interiors, the professional category of “interior designer” was still emerging in Australia.
Interior decoration was often supplied through department stores, furniture retailers, architects, upholsterers, or specialist furnishing companies.
Best helped establish a different model.
The interior designer could operate as an independent professional responsible for the total environment.
That meant understanding architecture, color, furniture, textiles, lighting, art, materials, spatial planning, sourcing, and the needs of individual clients.
Best was a founding member of the Society of Interior Designers of Australia, established in the early 1950s.
The organization helped give professional identity to a field that was becoming increasingly important within Australian architecture and design.
Best was therefore not simply designing rooms.
She was helping define what her profession could become.
👩💼 A Woman Building a Design Business
Best’s career is especially notable within the history of women in design.
She operated a substantial professional practice and retail business during decades when women faced significant barriers within architecture and commercial design.
Her work required far more than creative taste.
She managed staff.
Negotiated with suppliers.
Worked with architects and tradespeople.
Imported international furnishings.
Maintained client relationships.
Operated retail shops.
Managed commissions.
Presented ideas professionally.
And kept the enterprise running across major economic and cultural changes.
The polished rooms preserved in photographs can make the work appear effortless.
The business behind them was anything but.
🚢 Traveling for Design
International travel became another important source of inspiration.
Best traveled overseas to explore contemporary design, visit manufacturers, attend exhibitions, investigate new materials, and establish contacts.
These journeys allowed her to see modern design directly rather than relying entirely on photographs in magazines.
She could encounter new furniture at full scale.
Feel fabrics.
Examine construction.
Observe how European and American designers were arranging contemporary spaces.
The knowledge returned with her to Sydney.
Her clients therefore gained access not merely to imported products but to someone who understood the broader design culture that had produced them.
🪑 Saarinen, Bertoia, Aarnio & the New Furniture
The postwar decades produced some of the most recognizable furniture of the 20th century.
Designers experimented with fiberglass, molded plywood, steel wire, plastics, foam, and new manufacturing processes. Chairs increasingly behaved like sculptural objects.
Marion Hall Best embraced this new world.
Furniture associated with designers such as Eero Saarinen, Harry Bertoia, and Eero Aarnio could appear in her retail and decorating world, bringing the shapes of international modernism directly into Australian interiors.
These pieces were exciting because they did more than offer somewhere to sit.
They changed the visual structure of a room.
A chair could become a curve.
A wire frame could allow light to pass through it.
A molded shell could appear almost weightless.
Modern furniture allowed Best to compose interiors using volume and negative space rather than filling rooms with heavy traditional forms.
🧵 Marimekko and the Power of Pattern
Textiles offered another way to transform space.
Best’s shops became associated with bold imported fabrics, including the brilliantly colored work of Finnish company Marimekko.
Marimekko’s large-scale patterns belonged perfectly within the visual optimism of the 1960s.
Flowers could become enormous.
Simple geometric forms could cover an entire curtain.
Strong colors were allowed to remain strong.
For Best, textiles such as these could function almost like movable architecture. Curtains created walls. Upholstery reshaped furniture. Fabric softened the hard surfaces of modern buildings while introducing movement and pattern.
Best herself was photographed wearing Marimekko, an image that seems wonderfully appropriate.
She did not simply sell modern design.
She lived inside it.
👗 A Room for Mary Quant
One of Best’s most memorable late-career exhibition interiors was her 1967 “Room for Mary Quant.”
Mary Quant was one of the figures most closely associated with the fashion revolution of Swinging London, making her an ideal subject for an interior celebrating contemporary style.
The project allowed Best to bring together several strands of her career: vivid color, international furniture, fashion, modern materials, theatrical presentation, and a willingness to create interiors with unmistakable personality.
By the late 1960s, the cultural distance between fashion, furniture, graphics, interiors, art, and popular culture was collapsing.
A designer like Best could respond to all of them.
The room became more than somewhere to display furniture.
It became a portrait of modernity.
🎨 A Room Should “Sing”
Best’s philosophy was never reducible to buying fashionable objects.
Good interior design depended on relationships among color, texture, volume, movement, light, and space.
When those relationships worked together, a room could achieve something greater than the sum of its contents.
It could sing.
That idea may be the clearest way to understand her work.
Best was composing.
Furniture created rhythm.
Color created harmony and dissonance.
Objects provided accents.
Empty space functioned like silence.
Light continually altered the composition as the day changed.
The room was never merely decorated.
It was orchestrated.
📸 Interiors That Survive Mostly in Photographs
Interior design has an unusual problem compared with painting or sculpture.
Rooms disappear.
Walls are repainted.
Furniture is sold.
Curtains wear out.
Owners renovate.
Buildings are demolished.
Fashion changes.
As a result, surprisingly few of Marion Hall Best’s complete interiors survive exactly as she designed them.
Much of her legacy must be reconstructed through photographs, drawings, fabric samples, correspondence, trade catalogs, plans, wallpapers, furnishings, and archival documents.
Museums of History NSW holds the major Marion Hall Best collection, preserving an extraordinary record of her career and the broader history of professional interior design in Sydney.
Without such archives, many important interiors would effectively vanish from design history.
📚 Preserving the Marion Hall Best Collection
The surviving Marion Hall Best archive contains much more than beautiful photographs.
Plans reveal how rooms were organized.
Samples preserve the actual textures and colors of materials.
Business documents show how the practice functioned.
Trade catalogs reveal which manufacturers and designers were available.
Photographs preserve interiors that no longer exist.
Together, these objects make it possible to study Best not simply as someone with excellent taste but as a working professional designer.
That distinction matters.
Design history is not only a history of finished objects.
It is also a history of decisions.
🕰️ From Art Deco to 1970s Modernism
One of the most remarkable things about Best’s career is its duration.
Her earliest work emerged during the interwar period, when Art Deco, Moderne styling, and traditional decoration still shaped many Australian interiors.
She then worked through World War II and the postwar rebuilding period.
She witnessed Scandinavian modernism become internationally influential.
She embraced the new furniture and materials of the 1950s.
She absorbed the explosion of color, fashion, plastics, graphics, and pop culture during the 1960s.
And she remained active as minimalist and increasingly informal interiors emerged during the 1970s.
Many designers become identified with one decade.
Best evolved through several.
🛍️ Closing the Shops
Marion Best’s Queen Street business continued until 1974, an extraordinary run for a design enterprise that had begun before World War II.
By then, the design world had changed enormously.
Many of the principles Best had once needed to advocate had entered mainstream culture. Contemporary furniture was easier to obtain. Interior design had become more firmly established as a profession. International design circulated more quickly through magazines, retailers, travel, and exhibitions.
Best reduced her workload after selling the Queen Street shop but continued working with selected clients and a small staff.
She had spent decades helping build the world that now surrounded her.
🌏 Australian Modernism With an International Outlook
It would be easy to describe Best simply as the person who imported international modernism into Australia.
Her achievement was more interesting than that.
She selected.
Combined.
Reinterpreted.
A Saarinen chair did not automatically create a good interior.
Neither did a Marimekko curtain or an expensive imported wallpaper.
The designer still had to understand how the pieces interacted within a specific Australian room, for a specific client, under a specific quality of light.
Best’s interiors were international without becoming anonymous.
They belonged to the global world of modern design while remaining products of Sydney’s distinctive cultural life.
☄️ Marion Hall Best in the Comet Atomic Universe
Marion Hall Best fits beautifully into Comet Atomic because her career intersects with nearly every aspect of mid-century design culture.
There is modern furniture.
Experimental color.
Textile design.
Architecture.
Retail culture.
Fashion.
International travel.
Modern materials.
Women’s professional history.
Scandinavian and American design.
Australian modernism.
And the larger postwar belief that everyday environments could be redesigned for a changing world.
While architects transformed skylines and industrial designers reshaped household objects, interior designers changed the spaces people actually inhabited each day.
Best demonstrated that modernism did not stop at the front door.
It came inside.
✨ Why Marion Hall Best Still Matters
Marion Hall Best died in Sydney on June 26, 1988, but the design principles she championed feel remarkably contemporary.
Modern interiors still mix old and new.
Designers still use statement furniture as sculptural form.
Bold color has repeatedly returned after decades dominated by neutrals.
International textiles are routinely combined with local art and furniture.
Interior designers are now recognized as professionals responsible for far more than decorating surfaces.
Best helped establish that way of thinking in Australia.
Perhaps her most lasting lesson is also the simplest.
A room does not need to be timid.
Color can be intelligent.
Pattern can be sophisticated.
Modernism does not have to mean sterility.
An antique and a modern chair can share the same space.
And good design is not created by following a formula.
It comes from understanding how everything in a room affects everything else.
Marion Hall Best understood those relationships extraordinarily well.
She did not simply furnish rooms.
She made them sing.
🔗 Related Articles
- Art & Design: Modern Art, Mid-Century Design & Creative Culture
- Mid-Century Culture: Design, Style & Everyday Life From the Atomic Age
- Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Gave the Jet Age Its Shape
- Bridget Riley: The Mesmerizing World of Op Art
- On This Day: Artists, Musicians, Filmmakers & Cultural Icons
📚 Sources & Further Reading
- Museums of History NSW — Marion Hall Best Collection
- Museums of History NSW — The Colour-Filled Career of Marion Hall Best
- Australian Dictionary of Biography — Marion Esdaile Hall Best
- Design Institute of Australia — Marion Hall Best
- Design & Art Australia Online — Marion Hall Best
- Heritage NSW — Seven Elizabeth Street
- Museums of History NSW — The Interior Design Profession in Sydney
