Some locations do more than set the scene. They become part of the story.
Dakota was photographed in the extraordinary Eltham home of artist June Engish, built with her husband Kevin over many years. Full of character and shaped gradually over time, it felt like a natural fit for the world of Dakota.
The connection was closer than you might think. June was the neighbour of our very own Loretta, a long-time member of the Sage x Clare team, who knew June before her passing and had always admired the remarkable home she and Kevin created.
For a while, Loretta had been telling our Founder and Creative Director, Phoebe Bell, the same thing: you have to see this house.
The problem was, it was almost impossible to explain why.
From the street, there wasn't much to give it away. Loretta had lived nearby for around a decade before really getting to know June. Beyond the mud brick and arches at the end of the driveway was a world most neighbours had never seen.
When Phoebe eventually stepped inside, the reaction was fairly immediate.
She went home and messaged Loretta the next day to say she'd been awake until 1am thinking about it.
"I don't know if I've ever been in a home or a space that has impacted me that deeply."
Phoebe describes it a little like walking through the wardrobe into Narnia. You emerge back into ordinary life knowing you've just been somewhere extraordinary, but can't quite explain it to anyone who wasn't there.
And really, that was the beginning of this story.
We sat down with Loretta and Phoebe to talk about June, the home she created and how it eventually became the setting for Dakota.
June and Kevin began creating their Eltham home in the late 1950s, at a time when the area was alive with artists, architects, makers and people exploring different ways of living and building.
Through their connection to Dunmoochin, the historic artists' community founded by Clifton Pugh, June and Kevin had seen another possibility for making a home. June knew Victorian potter Alma Shanahan, who had established her practice there, and recalled being introduced to the possibility of building with mud brick.
With little money but plenty of resourcefulness, they began.
The house took shape gradually, with June and Kevin making mud bricks from the earth around them and adding to the home over many years as time, money and life allowed.
There is something particularly compelling about a house made this way. It wasn't designed, decorated and declared finished. It evolved according to the people living inside it.
And they didn't make it alone.
Horrie Judd worked alongside June and Kevin on the home for many years. A local Eltham builder with an extraordinary knowledge of mud brick construction, Horrie had worked at Montsalvat, including on its remarkable Long Gallery, and later worked closely with Alistair Knox, a pioneer of mud-brick architecture.
It was all part of a remarkable creative exchange happening across Eltham at the time. Artists knew builders. Builders worked with architects. Friends shared skills and ideas. With Montsalvat and Dunmoochin nearby, the lines between art, architecture, craft and everyday life were wonderfully blurred.
June and Kevin were very much part of that world.
Their immediate circle included Abby Heathcote, Alistair and Margot Knox, Myra and Matcham Skipper, and Tim and Betty Burstall, all significant figures in Eltham’s creative community. That circle extended into the wider Australian art world, crossing paths with Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Charles Blackman, Mirka Mora and Sunday Reed.
Then there was the "Boyd bedroom".
One of the bedrooms earned the name for the rather straightforward reason that members of the Boyd family would stay there. June's long-time friend Greg recalls Arthur, Yvonne, Mary and David among them.
It's one of those details that makes you look at the house differently.
Today, these are names we encounter in galleries, books and Australian art history. For June and Kevin, they were part of the creative community forming around them.
Dakota bedding shot in the 'Boyd' guest room.
It is almost impossible to stand in June's loungeroom now without wondering what those gatherings must have been like. Art being discussed. Ideas exchanged. People dropping in and staying far longer than intended.
One particularly good story involves New Year's Eve, when the Brown family of Brown Brothers would arrive with an enormous oak barrel of wine. The understanding, apparently, was that nobody left until it was empty.
Some houses reveal themselves through their architecture. Others through the life that happened inside them.
June's does both.
While the house tells us a great deal about June, it is only one part of a rather extraordinary life.
Textile Artist. Teacher. Writer. Publisher. School principal. Activist. Collector.
Her instinct for seeing possibility seems to have extended well beyond art and objects.
As principal of Brunswick Girls High School, June became a formidable advocate for her students. By 1974, the school had around 520 students, more than half from migrant backgrounds with limited English, and June had spent years pushing the Education Department for better facilities, more teachers and greater educational opportunities.
Under her leadership, the school explored bilingual and multicultural education, including Italian and Greek language programs. Her fight wasn't simply for a better building. It was for the students being disadvantaged inside it.
It tells you something important about June.
The same woman who could see possibility in a discarded piece of timber or an unconventional way of building a house was also deeply interested in what could be possible for people.
June in The Canberra Times, 1974.
And yet, for all June did and all the lives she touched, she remained something of a mystery closer to home.
Loretta had been her neighbour for years before really getting to know her. Others had lived in the street for decades without ever meeting the woman behind the mud brick arches at the end of the driveway.
Then, following lockdown, June appeared at a neighbourhood Christmas gathering.
She sat herself down and started talking.
Loretta remembers everyone becoming completely captivated as one story led to another. After years of wondering about the woman down the road, suddenly they were getting to know her.
That connection continued when June invited Loretta and other neighbours to open days at her gallery, with handwritten invitations delivered around the neighbourhood. It offered a glimpse into another side of June and the creative life she had spent decades building.
When the time eventually came for the house to be sold, Loretta asked June what she hoped would happen to it.
Her answer feels particularly telling.
The one thing I've learnt in this life is that the only certainty is change.
There is something wonderful about hearing that from a woman who had spent so much of her life making a place so distinctly her own.
You might expect someone who had built a home brick by brick, filled it with art and lived so much life within its walls to want it preserved exactly as she had left it.
June seemed to understand otherwise.
A home can have a history without becoming a museum. New people arrive. Rooms change. Objects move. Another chapter begins.
In a small way, Dakota became one of those chapters.
By the time we photographed the collection there, June had passed away and Phoebe had never had the chance to meet her.
And yet, June was everywhere.
In the things she had chosen to keep. In the artwork. In the colour. In the materials. In the strange and wonderful objects whose value seemed to lie in the fact that June had seen something in them.
Dakota was created with a similar appreciation for things that take time. Patchwork, embroidery, quilting and details with the familiarity of something inherited or rediscovered. A collection drawn to character rather than perfection, and to the idea that the things we live with become more meaningful through use.
Against June's mud brick walls, amongst decades of art and collected objects, those ideas didn't need much explaining.
They were already there.
We went to June's house because we thought we'd found an extraordinary place to photograph Dakota.
We came away with a much greater admiration for the woman who made it what it was. An artist and educator. A collector and activist. A woman who made a home from the earth beneath it, fought fiercely for her students, surrounded herself with art and ideas, and kept finding possibility in things other people might have overlooked.
June left behind a remarkable house.
But perhaps what made it remarkable was never really the house at all.
It was the life that had happened there.
Thank you June.
Shop our NEW Dakota collection here
With a whole lotta love xx