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City Living: Neometro residents and works | Amanda & Marco from Dow Street
Amanda and Marco’s home is a layered reflection of travel, study and story. Filled with conch shells, Sicilian ceramics and two relaxed black cats, it’s a quiet haven where every detail holds meaning. Their timber table, worn with use, has been the foundation for seven books and countless moments of calm.
Amanda is, often, somewhere else. As an anthropologist, her career takes her all over the world for studies and site visits, book tours and conventions. She tells stories of her travels and, just like her adventures, her house is full of colour.
A few years ago, Amanda and her partner, Marco, moved to Tasmania to embrace its solitude and calm. With no need to be in an office, their timing with the pandemic was perfect and their “little idyllic life”, as Amanda calls it, fulfilled all their needs and wants. She wrote a book and Marco wrote music. They gardened and they breathed in the southern air. “We went all white,” Amanda says of the Tasmanian house’s decor. “But bit-by-bit, the colour crept back in. I think we knew that the white wasn’t very natural for us!”
Back in Melbourne, Amanda and Marco’s Dow Street apartment is on the ground floor of a former warehouse. It was built in brick and concrete for a potato merchant at the nearby South Melbourne Market. Inside, massive one-metre-high concrete I-beams span the entire length of the building. Normally used for bridge building, it’s unclear why the merchant decided the roof of his potato warehouse needed the support of these wildly over-scaled beams, but their cartoonishly large size brings a big personality to the space. A courtyard at the rear is an eye on the sky and a glimpse to the past—original paint and remnants of commercial signage are reminders of Melbourne’s inner-city industriousness.
There’s a quiet luxury to Amanda’s home. Once a two-bedroom apartment, the second room was removed and the subsequent extra-spacious one-bedroom apartment feels open, easy and uncluttered. With sleeping and amenities all at the rear, the living and cooking, entertaining and lounging now takes place in the front two-thirds.
Two black cats, Pipi and Gigi, drift from the sunny balcony to the sunny kitchen. As one circles the leg of a chair, the other takes its spot on a cushion. “Of all the homes we’ve lived in, this is where they’ve been the most relaxed,” says Amanda. The cats agree with the lick of a paw and an approving meow.
“I work at this table all the time,” Amanda says, tapping on the timber top. “I’ve written seven books at this table! This table is my lucky child.” Amanda spends much of her time in the field, in particular the Gulf of Carpentaria. The couple’s travels, connections to academia and creative pursuits give their apartment an eclectic air. Their collections are as much about their friends in far-flung corners of the globe as they are about the places that they’ve visited themselves.
Along a wall at the entrance, several conch shells are a literal representation of her studies and learnings.
“They’re so beautiful,” says Amanda of the shells. “When I find them, I just have to stop.”
“Conceptually it’s hard for Western minds to get around, but in Yanyuwa country there is a kinship with non-human entities.”
“There’s nothing in here that is by accident, everything has a little bit of story, but the only thing we’ve acquired over the past few years are these traditional Sicilian ceramics,” she says, pointing to two vases sitting near the conch shells. “Marco’s sister gave them to him last time we were there.” Originally from Sicily, Marco has spent years travelling as a studio musician—this is the sixth country he has lived in—but recently also found himself in academia, studying music psychology and the effect music has on our moods and emotions.
“I was on a very long tour of India and I was playing something, and it had a completely different audience reaction to what I was expecting,” he says. “It was only in India, nowhere else. I ended up thinking, there’s something to this from a cognitive, psychological perspective.” In a couple of days Amanda and Marco leave for Los Angeles, before heading north to an anthropology convention in Seattle where Amanda will be reading from her latest book. For now, the table and the cats are home, the balance of study and practice has been struck and these two seem as comfortable as Pipi and Gigi (now back outside in the sun). Their home feels like a vault—safe and solid, a place to shut out the distractions and pressures of the outside world. “We spend a lot of time in our home, and for me it’s always been a real haven.”
This is an excerpt from the book, City Living: Neometro Residents and Works, with words by James Cameron and photography by Derek Swalwell. City Living is available online at Bookshop by Uro. Find out more about the book here, and more about Dow Street here.
