When we meet Meryl Hare, the founder of Sydney interiors firm Hare + Klein, almost a dozen pages into this condensed retrospective, she is wise and humbled. Her career, which began in Johannesburg and ascended in Sydney, has slowly developed with all the hallmarks of a sure-fire leader. Awards flowed in; a broad style, if it can be called that, flowed out.

Hare + Klein Interior is, above all, about this style. For a designer that has scaled the industry while trying to avoid a singular, brand-defining look, it reads as being closer to an atmosphere: a thick haze of richness and liveability, with over-scaled furnishings and hand-knotted rugs pointedly emerging like mountain peaks as regular features in a repertoire.

At a distance, the 14 Australian properties in the book, along with their mood boards and fabric swatches, are a return to what it means to imagine beyond a particular fashion at the same time as they are ideas realised by a firm and guided by clients. Yet, under a loupe, they are less a treatise against trends than they are a celebration of the plurality of tastes within the perimeters of sophistication and luxury.

While the book offers no secret as to how to survive – and grow – as an interior design business, or how to ultimately leave a legacy, it’s hard not to feel that this is Hare + Klein’s unguarded formula for most, if not all of these questions. Each project has something new, and each something new is timeless.

Hare + Klein Interior by Meryl Hare, published by Thames & Hudson, $70, is due for release July 2020.