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Country Style Indian Infusion A fascination with silk and saris inspired Katie Cameron’s fashion label, while things Indian permeate the open-plan Queensland home she shares with her family. 
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There’s a saying that if one ordinary tree stands in the middle of a sandalwood forest it eventually becomes impregnated with the aroma of sandalwood. This can happen to people too. Katie Cameron, for instance, has spent so much time in India rummaging though markets for hand-embroidered silk and antique saris for her fashion label Boom Shankar that almost every aspect of her life has become permeated with the ambience of the subcontinent.
It’s not just her bejeweled clothes and graceful demeanor. The home of Katie and her husband, Michael Ciavarella, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast is one of those sultry places that makes you feel like lounging as soon as you arrive. The laid-back atmosphere can be attributed as much to architect Grant Calder, a friend who lives two doors away, as it can to Katie and Michael’s relaxed approach to life. “We wanted a home that was open plan,” says Michael, an art teacher and sculptor. “Something that would suit the environment and have cross-ventilation so we didn’t need air-conditioners. We also wanted it to be open to the landscape and around it.” The couple moved in as soon as the hardwood floor was nailed to a timber frame, and the plywood walls and a corrugated iron roof offered minimum protection. These folk are serious about that “open to the landscape” business, and they know how to make it comfortable. Two breezeways mean that even on the hottest days, when your clothes are sticking to you like cling film, these rooms are fanned with tropical breezes that send wind chimes tinkling. Known as the ‘Boom Shankar house’, it cost less than $200 000 to build, and is so open to the world that it’s hard to tell if you’re inside or out. Charlie, their two-year-old son, toddles about on the deck. Jack the dog, and an assortment of magpies, bandicoots and goannas, make their way into the living room hoping for a feed. A pet kookaburra named Elvis is tame enough to be patted. 
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Although Michael is a stickler for simple, strong design and says, “too much clutter clogs up his thinking”, a fair amount of haphazard Indian magic has attached itself. In fact, it’s everywhere you look, from the raw umber coloured walls to Katie’s impromptu ‘shrines’ – statues of gods and goddesses, collections of candles and shells – on mantelpieces and bathroom shelves.
Katie first fell under India’s spell more than a decade ago. “I’ll never forget the first time I went to Rajasthan,” she recalls. “It’s a desert landscape, and across the horizon women were walking in these amazingly coloured saris: fuchsia pink, sea green, azure, turquoise, red. It blew my mind? I loved the way the women, whether rich or poor, dressed so beautifully.” At one stage Katie’s infatuation prompted her to live in Goa, on the south-west coast, for a year. She found old wedding saris, re-fashioned them into halter-neck tops and skirts, and sold them at the flea markets to the appreciative and cosmopolitan international ‘dance party’ crowd that flocked to the old Portuguese settlement. Boom Shankar was born. She still travels to India twice a year. The best markets tend to be local secrets, tucked away in hard-to-find places – “Often the alleyways leading to them are so narrow the only way to get the fabric out is by bicycle rickshaw or by walking,” she says. There she buys what she calls the ‘best fabric in the world’: hand-embroidered dancing skirts from the Gujarat regions, in the north of India, near the Pakistan border. (“They’re made by gypsies, who live in tents, they’re probably one of the last nomadic tribes in India.”) Then there’s the ‘best wedding saris’ – heavily beaded traditional garments that may be more than 50, even 80 years old, for which she must journey to Varanasi in central India and ransacks equally obscure markets. … Back home, Katie began selling her clothes at markets in Paddington, Sydney and at Eumundi, on the Sunshine Coast. “Women never seem to tire of the style,” she says. “It’s just so feminine and the design is ageless. I think in the West we’ve lost our femininity a bit, and it’s sad. We often feel we need to conform, and wear black or tailored clothes, especially in the city. When you come to a place like the Sunshine Coast, you suddenly feel freer to wear what you really like, which, for many women, is highly feminine, flowing, beautifully-coloured clothes.” The business is growing so fast that Katie recently moved her office out of her home into an industrial estate on the outskirts of Noosa. Nevertheless, when she feels harried, she’ll retreat to the quieter, more contemplative parts of the home. The four-poster bed, crafted by Michael, is draped in mosquito netting, yet otherwise open to the fragrance of the bush outside. Just in case that wasn’t romantic enough, he built the bed on castor wheels so he and Katie can roll right out onto the deck on summer nights, creating an instant bush boudoir. In the bathroom, Michael has used concrete blocks to create a bath that’s wide and deep enough to come from the steam houses of Istanbul. With one wall almost completely open to the bush outside, the bathroom is yet another place to commune with nature as the afternoon sun filters through the gum trees. Although the couple have attempted to protect the house from bushfires by clearing the land around it, away from the building there’s a dense tangle of bush heath. Although this clump looks inflammable, Michael also finds it enchanting: “It’s so primitive. When you look at it closely, you can see that every leaf, every gum nut has a use. There’s something so ancient about it.” 
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For Michael, who grew up in Shepparton, Victoria, moving to this tropical paradise has left him prone to the occasional nostalgia attack, usually centred on his extended Italian family. “Mum starts drinking little black cups of coffee with her friends at about 10am, and Dad still makes the best sausages. I miss being able to drop into one of my cousin’s places …”. Still – it could be worse: “We both just love the climate,” says Michael. And since he also loves to cook, he made sure that the kitchen was constructed exactly as he wanted it (“concrete benches and plenty of drawers”). He visits the nearby Eumundi markets twice a week, returning with boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables, and locally made cheeses ad bread. He’s hankering for a “big family table where we can all sit around for meals”. But the next project may well be an addition to the timber deck – an open fireplace or perhaps an outdoor bath. “That’s the thing with a house in the country,” Michael says. “You can just keep adding rooms when you need them.” And for Katie, that also means more nooks where she can light some incense – sandalwood of course.
Katie’s Boom Shankar fashion house business may be contacted on (07) 5473 0307 or at www.boomshankar.com.au.
Words by Ali Gripper. Photography by Jared Fowler.
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