From a sun-drenched, loft-style boutique in Auckland’s St Heliers, a small team of experts is redefining indoor greenery with a bespoke in-home potted plant design offering — a service that sits somewhere between landscape and interior design.
The store itself is a destination: filled with thriving potted plants for indoors and out, accompanied by the work of some of the world’s best ceramics brands, this is a place that feels more like a gallery of living things than a retail space — transformative and captivating.
It’s no surprise that this inspiring collection of plants and pots garnered attention, and the brand’s launch of personalised site visits and in-home consultations quickly began to thrive. Incorporating a wraparound service, site visits start with the fundamentals: light, scale, and temperature, before delving further into the rhythms of daily life. Where does the sun fall in the mornings, how does it traverse the spaces throughout the day? How do you want to feel when you walk into a space? It’s these questions that the Babylon team answer with designs specifically curated to thrive and to revive a home or workplace.
“There’s something innately beautiful about a space where potted plants thrive; it’s more than creating connections with nature — when indoor (and outdoor) plant design is done well, it transforms the whole experience of a space. Working between the fields of interior design and landscape design, it’s about creating a synergy between the two, bringing plants into the design fold as living pieces that make a space feel more like a home, greatly enhancing a natural sense of calm — something deeply human and increasingly essential in the way we live today,” Babylon Store co-founder Sandii McDonald explains.
Babylon’s pot collection reads like a who’s who of global ceramic design. There’s the raw, textural weightiness of Belgium’s Atelier Vierkant, the elegance of Danish brand Bergs Potter, the softly spoken minimalism of Serax, and the distinctive curves of Australian ceramicist duo Angus & Celeste. Local potters and artists include Tony Swanson, Gidon Bing, Nellie Ryan, and Vanessa Ceelan.
By pairing the work of these artists with the Babylon team’s horticultural expertise, choosing the right potted plants for indoor spaces, patios, and to add to wider landscape designs becomes a joyful process. There’s a satisfaction in knowing the plants chosen for a certain space are suited to it, will thrive in those conditions. In the event they don’t, the Babylon team also offers a potted plant treatment service, whereby an expert comes to you, assesses plant health, and provides care advice and recommendations.
Beyond the design service, Babylon fosters a vibrant community with its often sold-out workshops, which cover everything from the Japanese art of kokedama to designing succulent bowls and terrariums.
