Gill: Surf city limits

Gill Hutchison is a blogger, born-again surfer and producer based in a Melrose Place-esque enclave in Collingwood. After a bodyboarding epiphany in Mexico, Gill (aka ‘Gilly Slater’) returned to Melbourne a surf-obsessive, balancing her busy city work and social life with frequent trips ‘down the coast’. We visited to talk surfing, pastries and domestic sanctuaries.

I have the master bedroom, which is as big as the apartment that I used to live in! I call myself the princess in the tower because I come upstairs and my bedroom is pretty much self-contained. There’s no television in the house so I spend most of my time reading, if I’m here. Reading books or surf blogs or watching surf videos! Or doing freelance work. I get up early during the week, about 6am. Twice a week I go to the pool and swim, usually with a few mates who I surf with and then we go straight from the pool to Babka for a pastry and a coffee just to cancel out the swim. My idea of a home is somewhere you can absolutely relax, unwind and sleep well. Aesthetics – just to have everything you love around you. My favourite thing in the world is my surfboard. I sleep with it at the end of the bed so it’s the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night. The name for my surfboard is dame cinco, which means ‘high five’ in Spanish. I love that. I also love an illustration that my flatmate did of my friend Kate when we went to Mexico together. There’s Kate dressed in a traditional Mexican outfit which she pulls off, totally ‘Frida Kahlos’ it! And all my books – having worked in publishing for 11 years, books just mean so much to me I don’t know what I’d do without them.

All photos by Eugenia Lim (including two snaps of Gill’s wonderful artist housemate Leo Greenfield‘s home studio).

Gill is the surf-obsessed mastermind behind Not Without My Do-Rag. Check out more photos of Gill’s bedroom over at the blog of our kindred UK-based counterpart Olivia Howitt: What’s in your bedroom (dedicated to photos and interviews with interesting bedroom inhabitants). As part of our Living not Decorating section, we’re happy to announce a UK-Australian exchange with What’s in your bedroom, sharing spaces from our cities in an ongoing collaboration.