Clarissa and Tim have made creativity part of the rhythm of home. Between family life, their agency and their own art practices, their Warrandyte home has become a place where making is given room to exist.

It’s something they’re quite intentional about. Each year, they sit down together for what they call their “little summit”, looking ahead at what they want for their family, their work and themselves. Creativity is always part of that conversation, with the pair continually looking for ways to make more space for it in their lives.

That spirit runs throughout their home. There’s Clarissa’s ceramic studio in the garage, Tim’s painting and photography downstairs, art made by friends on the walls and pieces collected over time. The original character of the 1976 house remains too, from its sunken lounge to the details they chose to preserve rather than replace.

For our latest Heart to Heart, we spent time with Clarissa and Tim talking about building a creative life together, finding time to make alongside parenthood, learning to love the wonky bits and why neither of them expects their home to ever really be finished.

Meet Clarissa & Tim 

Tell us a little about yourselves...

Clarissa (Managing Director at True Tribe): I’m an artist and a director at a small agency here in Melbourne. 

Tim (Creative Director at True Tribe): And I also work at that small agency, and I’m an artist too.

Tim: We’re very big dreamers. Every year we do what we call a little summit, where we write down our goals and what we’d like to see over the next three to five years: for our family, personally, for the business. Creativity is always a big one. We’re always mapping for more creativity in our lives rather than less. Other than that, family is probably an even bigger priority.

Tim: I didn’t have any formal training in painting. We’ve both done pottery classes at Warrandyte Pottery Studio, but when I was growing up I was almost blind in one eye. My eye was so lazy that my optometrist made me blindfold my good eye for an hour every night and just draw.

Ever since then, I’ve always doodled or drawn. It was only maybe two or three years ago that I thought, okay, I’m going to pick up a different medium and try painting. It’s quite fun and whimsical and not too serious. 

Clarissa: For me, art wasn’t really an option when I was at school, or even at uni. It was more: study, get good grades, get into a course and off you go. Fast-forward ten years and I was pregnant with my second, and I was absolutely beat. I joined the pottery studio and just started pottering around.

After I had my son, I’d bring him down in the carrier when he was only a few weeks old. He’d sleep on me and I’d create. 

Mask paintings by Tim Harris

When you each walk into your studio, what happens to the agency part of your brain?

Clarissa: My studio is a total escape. I switch off almost immediately from being a mum, an agency owner, a boss, and just get completely lost in what I’m making.

Tim: Mine is probably the opposite. I used to worry that work, photography, painting and everything else couldn’t all go together.

But since I’ve started painting, I’ve become much freer in the way I approach photography. I’m hoping that having my studio alongside where I edit my photography will bring a looser, more fun approach to my work too.

What can you each express through your art that you can’t through your work at the agency?

Clarissa: When I make art, it’s so different from the work I do through the agency because I have absolutely no restrictions. There are no limitations from clients or briefs. I’m purely free to do what I want.

Even now, my art kind of shocks me sometimes. There’s definitely a darkness to it, but there are also some super sparkly, sunshiny moments.

It’s about seeing those different sides of myself. Definitely not something corporate Clarry would do.

Tim: Someone once asked me which one, photography, painting or clay, makes me feel like an artist. And I was like, excuse me? They all make me feel like an artist.

Then they asked which one makes me meditate.

That would only be clay and painting.

It made me think differently about how much you can escape the real world by doing something different from your other creative work.

Ceramics is quite unforgiving. Has it changed either of your relationships with getting things wrong?

Clarissa: Ceramics is incredibly unforgiving, but it’s forced me to lean into the ugliness of it all. I love when pieces have fine cracks through them. A lot of my work is non-functional for that reason. I love when glaze drips, I love piercing clay, adding stones to it and just mucking around with it. I try to be really intentional with every mark, every fingerprint, every placement, so there isn’t too much meddling.

Tim: I was thinking about this the other day. I’m actually not a massive fan of ceramics. I’m not the type who’ll go into a store and pick up a mug and start looking at it.

But I really like what clay does to me.

It slows you down and makes you reflect on your day. If you’re not in a good headspace, it’ll tell you that. It comes through in the clay. It’s almost like diarying at the end of the day and reflecting on where you’re at.

'Life's a circus' ceramic art by Clarissa Harris

Are you both more attached to the pieces that come out perfectly, or the slightly wonky ones?

Clarissa: I love wonky. I love pieces that are almost falling apart. To me, it tells the story of the process. One of the coolest things about clay is that it holds memory. If you’ve bent it out of shape during its raw process, it will try to snap back into that shape no matter how hard you try to push it out. So I totally lean into the wonkiness.

Tim: I probably lean into messiness with painting too. I find the more I paint, the looser it gets, which is good because I like a loose painting.

Tim: Photography was always for someone else. I was always trying to make somebody else happy.

Whereas with painting, I just want to get out what’s inside me. Whatever I’m grappling with or laughing about. You might put on a song that gets you moving in a certain way and want to make something from that place.

It’s never exactly what it looks like in your head. But when you make it, you think, Oh, that’s me. I did that.

Does living a little further out change the way you both spend time at home?

Clarissa: Absolutely. We spend way more time at home. We’re complete homebodies. We love wandering outside, but we also love staying inside and enjoying the different spaces here.

Tim: It’s been a big change of pace since moving from the city. We spend a lot of time down by the river and at Warrandyte Pottery Studio, where we’ve had some great mentors from the beginning of our clay practice. We’re at the playground a lot and there are beautiful river walks around here. And you always run into locals. You go outside and you’re 100% going to run into at least three friends and probably spend the afternoon with them.

Clarissa: Having more space has meant we can do more with our creative practices, but also just enjoy being outdoors and in nature.

Tim: Community has been a big one too. We started a little thing called For All Thinkers And Artists, which meets once a month at Warrandyte Pottery Studio. It’s been really cool seeing people who maybe didn’t label themselves as creatives come out of the woodwork and start identifying as an artist or a creative. 

Shop our lounge + home here.

Was there a feature that made you think, we have to live here?

Clarissa: There were a couple. The first would absolutely be the conversation pit we’re sitting in. It’s counter-levelled, hangs over the dining table and is just the cosiest place.

Tim: Every time we came to look at the house, I discovered another area or room I hadn’t seen before. I’d think,how did I miss this completely? It’s very open, but there are also plenty of areas where you can retreat and do your own thing. You don’t feel like you’re away from everyone, but at the same time, you can be alone.

Clarissa: The potential of the garden was another part of it. I love cacti and an arid landscape is ideal, so when I saw all the rocks and the soil, it was pure happiness for me.

Do you both feel a responsibility to the original architecture, or are you quite happy to mess with it?

Tim: When we first purchased the property, Clarissa reached out to the architect and asked questions about why certain things were the way they were.

The house was built in 1976. It’s quite industrial, but it also has that 70s charm. We didn’t want to mess around with it too much, and we never really saw ourselves as renovators. We were looking for somewhere that didn’t need too much done because we love to decorate and have quirky things on display. From the outside, people don’t really know what it is. You look up the hill and think, is that a commercial building? Is it a Telstra exchange? Or is it a fun house? 

It’s our fun house. Shop our kitchen + dine decor here.

You both describe your home as “loud, a mix of old and new, lived in.” What makes a home feel lived in rather than simply styled?

Clarissa: For me, a home that feels lived in is a home where there’s mess. I really love mess, honestly. I’m not talking about mountains and mountains of washing everywhere, but some toys laid out or an open book someone has been flicking through, gotten distracted and left there.

To me, that’s a home where someone is comfortable and safe to just be who they are, and to come back to whatever it was they were doing.

Tim: We’re also very intentional about not styling in a way where everything is one thing. We try to buy secondhand wherever we can. Hard rubbish too.

Clarissa: A lot of hard rubbish.

Tim: We just try to make it work. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s okay.

In the first place we lived, we were really hesitant about hanging paintings and frames. Now we think, walls can be fixed. Holes can be patched. So we just go for it.

If something doesn’t work, it’ll probably get moved. We might put something somewhere and six months later it’ll be in a completely different room.

Do you think a home ever reaches a point where it’s “finished”?

Tim: I don’t think this house will ever feel finished. Every time we say we’ve done the thing we wanted to do, we come up with at least ten more.

The next project is a little garden folly. We’ve got some beautiful old doors from Southeast Asia and want to build it out of recycled materials.

Clarissa: I could list a million and one other projects, but I won’t.

What have you added to the house that feels unmistakably like you?

Clarissa: That pantry is a really special place for me too. Tim surprised me with a plaque as a nod to my late grandmother and included some photos of us together, almost like a little altar. Every time I go in there, which is multiple times a day for snacks and everything else, I’m always having conversations with her. It’s a super special space.

Is there something in your home that has followed you both through different chapters of your lives?

Tim: Our first couch. We had this tiny spot in Fitzroy and Clarissa told me she’d finally found a couch. I got home and thought, Clarissa, that is the smallest thing I’ve ever seen.

It’s a beautiful little Danish couch, and we’ve just held onto it.

Clarissa: At one point we moved it upstairs to photograph it for Facebook Marketplace, but it fit there so perfectly. We put some rugs on it for Scout, who’s an elderly dog now, so she can hop onto that and then onto our bed.

So it stayed. I think it always will. Good memories.

What’s the piece of art in your home with the best story?

Tim: I became friends with an artist on Instagram. Initially we were going to trade prints, but we decided we wanted one of her originals. We asked her to make a family portrait in her style, whatever that might be. She took notes about our family: Clarissa being a bit of a boss lady, I was photographing lots of cars at the time, our son Zephyr’s name.

It’s this beautiful, super colourful piece that you see as soon as you walk through the door. It gives you a pretty good representation of what’s going on throughout the rest of the house. We also have the two cowboys by our friend Mike. He was actually the person who introduced us to Sage x Clare. We’d stay at his house and think, What is this beautiful chaos on the beds? We copied him. Now all of our beds have Sage x Clare on them too.

Clarissa: The way we entertain absolutely has not changed. Our first house didn’t even have a dining room. We didn’t have a dining table and we’d still have heaps and heaps of people over. We’d open the garage roller door and everyone would spill out into the alleyway.

Here, it just means there are different breakout spaces, especially now that friends have kids and we have our own kids. If you’re a little bit introverted, there are plenty of places to escape to as well. Fall asleep on the couch if you want to. 

Has becoming a parents changed what you make, or changed the way you find time to make it?

Clarissa: Becoming parents has really changed the way we create and how we make space for it.

At the moment, we tag team. Between work, art, caring for the kids and family time, which is so precious to us, we each spend a night away in the studio. Once the kids go down, one of us is in there making something.

Outside of that, it’s just finding time where we can.