Cult tailor Patrick Johnson opens stupendous new Sydney showroom

Patrick Johnson spent years searching for the perfect place to set up a new showroom in Sydney’s CBD. But once he was invited to inspect a recently vacated space inside heritage-listed St James Trust Building on Elizabeth Street, it took him less time to sign the lease than it takes to finish a light dinner at haute spot Bambini Trust downstairs.

“Rob, my business partner and financial controller, said ‘you’ve taken two years to find a space and then you signed a lease in two hours? You are the most annoying person in the world’,” Johnson recalls. “But we just knew when we walked in here, we’re like, yes, this is right.”

If the original Paddington location feels like a cubby house for fresh adventures in tailored menswear, this former ballroom speaks to what has matured into an established business, one with seven showrooms across Sydney, Melbourne, London and New York. The menswear range has expanded beyond its made-to-order suiting to encompass elegant ready-to-wear pieces and more urban dressing.

While not stocked in the new location, Johnson’s successful womenswear line, P. Johnson Femme, has adopted a similar hybrid approach to style, taking functional basics and making them feel -– and look – effortlessly cool. That quiet luxury trend? P. Johnson Femme has been doing it since birth.

Johnson may have locked in the paperwork but once the ink dries, it’s wife and business partner Tamsin Johnson who transforms the blank space into something that contains the familiar comforts of a P. Johnson location. Although, she confesses, there wasn’t too much that they wanted, or needed, to change this time around.

It only took six months after picking up the keys before the doors were open to the public. The directive was to accentuate the location’s innate grandeur without it being overwhelming, drawing attention to the huge windows that allow plenty of natural light, the soaring ceilings and chevron flooring.

“I think where our Paddington office has more of a warehouse feeling, the natural bones here are much more grand,” she says. “The layout was quite easy to get my head around and then the pieces fell into place after that.” Or lifted in through the windows, as the case was for an enormous armoire sourced from Montpelier that looms over one half of the room.

“Here we’ve gone a bit more mid-century, with cleaner lines, keeping it a bit more casual and accessible,” Tamsin says. “The only thing we changed physically were the light fittings.” It’s modern and airy, and the only real nod to the room’s past incarnation, she adds, comes in the form of the red velvet curtains that demarcate change rooms and line a boudoir-esque side room complete with chinoiserie.