At Home With Photographer and Director Cybele Malinowski

Sydney photographer and film maker Cybele Malinowski is known for her playful, edgy fashion shoots and portraits of actors and musicians, but her passion is peeking into other people’s homes. For more than a decade, her modelmaison series has chronicled the homes and lives of models around the world.

Malinowski’s family home – shared with her photographer husband Daniel Boud and their three daughters Lilya, Lulu and Lola – in the beachside suburb of Clovelly is equally worthy of documentation, from its light-filled living areas to its spectacular views.

“I love being here so much, it’s hard to motivate myself to leave the house!” Malinowski says. “I have the ocean in the distance and its omnipresence is sublime. The ocean is ever-changing and yet ever constant. A whole day can pass here and I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on a thing.”

Cybele, can you tell us about your home and your interior aesthetic?

I grew up in a modernist house in Woollahra, built when my family arrived from Poland in the 1960s. This house is a bit of an homage to that – a modernist aesthetic, with a more family-friendly functionality. We only moved here a year ago and I have spent the past 12 months making this home our forever home. Drawing inspiration from Palm Springs and Mediterranean gardens, we have designed the garden with a more drought-proof, low-maintenance, future-proof plan. From the cactuses in the curbside garden we set the scene as you approach the house. We follow this playful take on modernism through the interior design, helped by my dear friend Karina Crombie from KCreative.  

I am not a fan of fads, so we have tried to stick with timeless pieces that will age well and a restrained colour palette for each room, that is paired with my husband Daniel Boud and my photographic artwork. With each piece of furniture, I mocked up a scene including my art, to make sure it was cohesive. The art informs the space. Daniel and I have been shooting for 20 years so between us, we have lots of photos that we plan to rotate around, as we and the family evolve. I see this house as family-centred modernism, something that I think a lot of the 20th century modernist houses didn't quite nail. They were rather masculine visions of what a home should be.

Do you gravitate towards any particular notes or fragrances for the home?

Arabian Oud sets the scene, as you enter the house and step under the circular staircase. For the bedrooms and bathrooms I prefer something a little softer and lighter, like Paradiso Del Sole. Upstairs in the kitchen and living spaces it’s all about Balinese Ylang Ylang. I love having consistent smells for each room, though I am considering switching things up as summer arrives.

Do you have any fragrance rituals?

Every morning I roll some Balinese Ylang Ylang on my wrists. Just a whisper of it as I go through my day. I am just obsessed with the ylang-ylang and I love that being my scent of 2024. I have a feeling Arabian Oud will be in 2025.

Can you share a favourite fragrance memory?

The smell of YSL Champagne, that is my mum. It’s Vienna in year 5. It’s mum dressed up in a floor-length silk ballgown. It’s safety. It’s femininity. It’s love. They don't make it anymore. I will keep a bottle of it forever more. So I will always have access to mum even when she is gone.

What time of day do you most enjoy being in your home?

Sunrise and sunset. Often my baby Lola wakes me up before the sun rises. We head upstairs, I make a coffee, and we sit and watch the sun as it crawls over the ocean and brings with it the promise of a new day. I also love the late afternoons. The kids are in the pool, I’m on the balcony with Daniel or friends, bubbles in hand, record player on, the sky awash in a shifting palette of dusk colours.  

What are some of the most treasured objects in your home?

My grandmother’s photo album. As a child I would leaf through the pages, her world a distant cry from our safe and opulent life in Sydney. Only one photo exists of her as a child. A black and white image, it would have been 1925. Born in Odessa, orphaned, she somehow survived the early and harsh days of communism in Ukraine, then she was a teenage nurse, where she met my grandfather. My father was then born in the war, on a hospital train, then a decade in communist Poland, then Vienna, and finally they arrived in Australia in 1965. All of this is documented in her photo album. Her whole life, from grainy black and white, to 1980s tropical holidays in colour. It was this album that perhaps more than anything gave me the photo bug. I have been obsessed ever since with capturing the ephemeral. Of creating memories and archiving them.

Also the photo of Lola as you enter the house. She is dressed in my grandfather’s YSL jacket. This photo is an homage to my grandmother’s photo album, the generations that have brought us to this point in time.

How do you like to bring mementos or souvenirs of your travels into your home?

My travels are more through time than place. I am a hopeless romantic for the past and trying to preserve it. Having two photographer parents, the kids' lives are – needless to say – very well documented! Every time we travel we make a photo book. Our shelves are filled with our memories. Our walls too. I would say half the art in our house is Daniel or my photographs. Also, being a hopeless sentimentalist, my grandmother’s dressing table chair is in the bathroom, our shelves are filled with thick-cut crystal vases from my family, our special occasion plates were my mum’s parents’ Willow pattern plates, my office wall is covered in gold-framed paintings from my parents, my garden has plants I have brought with me from my childhood home.

Your modelmaison project photographs models in their homes. Who has had the most surprising or envy-inducing home and why?

Honestly, being welcomed into a model's home to shoot this intimate series has always been such a privilege. From Soviet Block family apartments in Kyiv, to palatial villas in Bali, it has been such a joy. The homes that I have loved the most have been family homes. I just love meeting the mums, dads, sisters, dogs, horses and creatures and creature comforts that make a home a home.

I’d say the most unique house that comes to mind was Elle Morris’s family home in the hills of the Central Coast. She has a horse, cats and her rooster had a little bridge that allowed it to climb through her window into her bedroom. It was just paradise. Elle and her mum. And all the animals. I think that the home and its surrounding bushland may have been redeveloped into housing, which is why this project is just so important to me. To capture the ever-changing world.

Of all the people you’ve photographed, who has been the most memorable and why?

I’m just gonna give you what you want: Jason Momoa. I mean, the man lifted me up out of the ocean and threw me over his shoulders. And then, after saying again and again that he would not take his top off for the shoot, right at the last moment, as he walked out of the crashing waves like a sea god, he ripped his T-shirt off single-handedly and threw it at me.

Written by Michelle Bateman