Nipped in the bud: Clement Meadmore's interior for the Teahouse

It is widely known that prior to embarking on a successful international career as a sculptor, Clement Meadmore was an influential Australian designer of furniture and of the interior of the groundbreaking modernist Legend Espresso and Milk Bar in Melbourne in 1955. With its black metal and fibreglass furniture, semi-abstract murals by artist Leonard French and its brilliant colour scheme, the Legend was Melbourne's most remarkable café interior at the time when the city was gearing up to host the Olympic Games and doing its best to live up to the image of a progressive and cosmopolitan city. What appears to have been overlooked is that Meadmore designed a second café and milk bar called the Teahouse for Ion Nicolades, the same client who had commissioned the Legend. In its short life the relatively simple interior of the Teahouse embodied a complex mix of competing narratives. Based on the traditional British model of the ladies' tearoom, it incorporated allusions to colonial mastery over subject peoples and fantasies of empire inspired by the exotic origins of the everyday commodity of tea. Other references include an irreverent recoding of Victorian vernacular style and lingering features of streamline moderne styling that characterised the design of Australian milk bars. It also derived elements of design from Scandinavian and American modernism. This paper brings to light Meadmore's forgotten interior for the Teahouse and, referring to theories of the commodity spectacle and spectacular space, seeks to explore the way its diverse and competing narratives operated in a quirky melange. It also uses postcolonial theory to explore the way in which it supported continued identification with 'Britishness' and allegiance to the British Empire in the female citizens of a former settler colony, while simultaneously gesturing towards a fundamentally internationalist outlook through the language of functional modernism.