House Style
Patrick and Tamsin Johnson turn a sprawling Paddington warehouse into the most complete expression yet of Australia’s coolest fashion label.
Patrick Johnson was driving through Paddington a few years ago when a warehouse on Gosbell Street brought him to a halt. He parked, poked his head inside and discovered an arts foundation. The building was also very much not for sale.
That might have been the end of it. Instead, Johnson kept thinking about its open steel frame, boat-shed roof and the suggestion that something interesting was happening behind its unmarked exterior.
“It didn’t look like a shop, which is exactly why I couldn’t let it go,” says Patrick, [AGE TK], the founder of P Johnson. “I like to look at a building and get that sensation of, ‘I wonder what goes on in there.’”
Fast-forward to 2026 and the object of his fixation has become P Johnson’s new global flagship. Set over 510 square metres, it is the most significant opening in the company’s 17-year history and, by some distance, the most enjoyable fashion store to open in Sydney in years.
Patrick has described Gosbell Street as “a house before it is a store”, and the distinction is not merely semantic. A glamorous coffee bar greets visitors near the entrance. Sofas and armchairs encourage them to settle in. Clothes occupy the space without consuming it, while the tailoring salons offer the discretion that made-to-measure requires. The place feels social without being alienatingly clubby or embalmed by high-end retail polish.
“I’d hope people feel no urgency to leave,” Patrick says. “I just want people to feel entirely comfortable to hang around.”
His wife, interior designer Tamsin Johnson, [AGE TK], has shaped every P Johnson showroom since the company’s early days. Together, the pair have some claim to being Sydney’s answer to Charles and Ray Eames, albeit with soft tailoring and antiques in place of moulded plywood. Gosbell Street gave Tamsin more room than any of its predecessors, but it also risked turning a distinctive warehouse into a conventional retail floor with better furniture.
“Scale was actually the gift here,” she says. “A space like this lets you plan it as a sequence of rooms rather than one big retail floor, so you’re always arriving somewhere: the coffee bar at the front, then a fitting salon, then a mezzanine that looks over it all.”

The building’s industrial bones remain visible, but elements from a particularly well-appointed home temper them. Vermilion corduroy curtains introduce colour and softness; back-lit mirrors flatter both the clothes and their wearers; an ocelot-patterned carpet appears underfoot. Warm task lighting replaces the indiscriminate glare of downlights. The effect is handsome and slightly louche, with just enough friction to keep good taste from becoming predictable.
Tamsin preserved the steel, concrete and interplay of straight lines and sweeping curves. The maritime quality that first caught Patrick’s attention resurfaces in cable-mesh balustrades that subtly evoke the harbour.
Tamsin wanted the space to capture the team’s levity and audacity, giving its fresh Australian coastal mood a slightly decadent edge.
That combination neatly describes P Johnson itself. Since starting the business in Brisbane in 2008, Patrick has loosened the stays of Australian menswear with soft tailoring and breathable fabrics. His fixation with 1980s Europe is most clearly telegraphed by the monumental black-and-white portrait of Gianni Agnelli that looms over the showroom. Yet the influence is also there in the clothes: the ease of an Armani silhouette, filtered through Sydney light and a refusal to stand on ceremony.
The result appeals across the city’s smart set, from scenesters drawn to its relaxed proportions to deep-pocketed movers and shakers who depend on the made-to-measure service. The ready-to-wear collections have grown steadily more assured, while the expansion into womenswear suggests that Patrick’s exacting sensibility travels well beyond the haberdashery.
The new location presents the entire menswear offer, from casual pieces to made-to-measure tailoring, under one roof. Its scale gives the staff time to understand how a client lives before prescribing what he should wear.

“It’s the opposite of the top-down luxury model where the brand tells the client what to want,” Patrick says. “We prefer to ask. We learn what a client’s life actually looks like, and then use our good sense and will to solve it.”
The coffee bar is crucial to that exchange. Tamsin conceived it as the showroom’s hub. It resets expectations upon arrival, while sightlines offer glimpses of other visitors without sacrificing privacy.
“The whole space is designed on the idea of comfort, contrasted with a small amount of surprise or conflict,” she says.
Gosbell Street arrives as P Johnson becomes increasingly international, with showrooms in London and New York and trunk shows as far afield as Jakarta, Los Angeles and Miami. Yet the decision to plant its largest and most complete expression in Sydney feels pointed. The company’s ease, sociability and refusal to confuse seriousness with solemnity belong to this city.
Patrick talks about building Australia’s first true lifestyle house, even if corporate overuse has diminished some of those words. The aspiration is to stand alongside the great European names without borrowing their hauteur.
“Australia is where our sensibility comes from: the ease, the light, the hospitality, the refusal to take ourselves too seriously,” he says. “Gosbell Street is us planting a flag on home ground.”
It is a grand ambition. The clever part is that the place never feels as though it is trying too hard to prove it.
This story appears in the SPRING 2026 issue of Robb Report Australia & New Zealand. Click here to subscribe.
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