About the Founder of Chamelle Designs
Located in Sydney, Australia, Chamelle Designs is a small, children’s decor online business, founded and run by creative entrepreneur and a mum of one, Livia. Chamelle Designs offer a range of creative and stylish decor solutions to liven up your children’s spaces. Livia uses inspiration from her diverse life experiences, extensive travels and love of films to create innovative and on trend designs.
We hope this website will be a source of inspiration for those who refuse to settle for boring, bland and blah decor and seek to create magical, wonder-filled spaces for their children.
“All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.” — Antoine de Saint Exupéry (‘The Little Prince’)
About Livia
A professional graphic designer, web designer and award-winning photographer, I (Livia) am the designer and founder behind Chamelle Designs. Being stuck in “The world’s longest lockdown” (for 267 days) in Melbourne between 2020 and 2021 gave me the idea to start my own children’s home decor business. I decided use this time stuck in the house to decorate my son’s bedroom but couldn’t find exactly what I wanted… Thus began a long search to find temporary ways of decorating a rented house with my own custom designs… And here we are! I am finally opening my own online store and I hope you’ll find something you like. If not, I am happy to do custom designs for you too :) Feel free to email me.
On interior design and decoration
I’ve long had a love of interior design, decoration, furniture and Ikea. During my childhood and teenage years I would draw floor plans and designed houses and rooms. I studied technical drawing. I wanted to study architecture or interior design in university (but I ended up studying visual communication – see section below).
Around 2012-2013 while I was living in Geneva, Switzerland, I lived near and often passed a children’s furniture store full of beautiful hand made and hand painted wooden furniture. The window displays featured some of the most gorgeous, dreamy, whimsical and fairytale-like scenes I’d ever seen… I ended up buying an all-white chandelier from the owner to furnish my own apartment (European apartments don’t come with light fittings!). Over time I became friends with her and one day she asked me to be her photographer! You can see some of my photos for Elissa Gassert here. I think passing in front of her store on a regular basis for such a long time, seeing her constantly changing window displays and spending time in her store must’ve planted some seeds in my head… It certainly reignited my love of children’s furniture, design and decoration!
On Entrepreneurship and E-Commerce
I’ve always known I wanted to be an entrepreneur, from a young age. When I was a child in the 80s and 90s my parents were quite entrepreneurial. They imported new and innovative childrens’ products from Taiwan (this was a time where many household goods were made in Taiwan or Hong Kong and not China yet) and sold them at the local markets. I brought many such items to primary school and they were always a big hit! My classmates were always hoping I would gift them with such items at their birthday parties….
Many years later my first foray into being an entrepreneur also coincided with being an e-commerce store owner on eBay. This was before most people even knew what eBay was and before Paypal even existed. I started my own online store (with my own domain name) in 2002, but that was when the Australian public weren’t quite ready for online shopping yet.
In 2010 I moved to Europe, worked, studied, travelled extensively, got married, moved back to Australia, and once I had our first child in 2019 I knew that I wanted to be a stay at home mother with my own business run from home. Actually, I kind of already knew this a long, long time ago… I have been creative my whole life (winning art and colouring-in competitions since the age of 5) and I wanted to work to my own time schedule (which is not the conventional 9 to 5). I also strongly believe in reading, learning, researching, doing, and experiencing. Life is too short to sit around and be passive and I like to keep my mind sharp and active. I have an honours degree in Visual Communication (majoring in photography) from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), an MBA in Digital Marketing from INSEEC/Omnes Education (Lyon), and have done many courses in Entrepreneurship and Web design. I also speak Chinese Mandarin and French.
Where does the name Chamelle come from?
Camels are my favourite animal and chameau (masculine) or chamelle (feminine) is the French word for a two-humped camel. I made up this random name many years ago (way before I started learning French), bought the domain name, secured all the social media usernames (Chamelle Designs and Chamelle Photo/Photography) and it just stuck. I couldn’t imagine changing it now but who knows what will happen in the future…?