IN A NEW LIGHT

From Winnetka to Sydney, Taylor McGuire Barber followed an unconventional path from art, fashion, and finance to entrepreneurship, as a leader of one of Australia’s most distinctive design houses.

Taylor McGuire Barber never imagined she would build a life in Australia. Then again, very little about the Winnetka native’s journey has followed a predictable path.

Today, Barber is a director of DUNLIN, the internationally recognized Sydney design house that she runs with her husband, architect and CEO Nicholas Barber. Together, they create original lighting collections and represent exceptional global brands, including Rose Uniacke, Davey Lighting, Original BTC, Beadlight, Disderot, Atelier Alain Ellouz, Handelsmann + Khaw Lighting, and J’Jute.

Yet long before Barber was curating lighting, furniture, fabrics, and objects for some of Australia’s leading architects and interior designers, she was a self-described tomboy growing up on the North Shore.

“My whole upbringing basically revolved around sports,” she says. “Art was always a passion of mine, but my main focus growing up was athletics.”

Barber attended Miami University in Ohio, where she played Division I soccer and majored in painting. After graduation, her interest in fashion took her to New York and the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she completed an intensive two-year fashion design program in just one year. She went on to spend five years working in fashion, including positions with Jill Stuart and Tommy Hilfiger. The experience was invaluable, but Barber eventually sensed it was time to make a change.

“I didn’t know what I was looking for at that point, but what I was doing didn’t feel right,” she says. “So, I quit without really knowing what I was going to do next.”

Her mother, Ellen McGuire, a self-taught equity trader, encouraged Barber to take the Series 7 exam and explore finance. Barber did—and soon found herself moving from the largely female fashion industry into the predominantly male world of equity trading. Surprisingly, she loved it. As a technical analyst, Barber studied market patterns and relied heavily on intuition—skills that, while applied in a vastly different setting, were not entirely removed from the instincts she had developed in fashion.

“While it was incredibly different from fashion, it still involved following my instincts,” she explains. That trust in her intuition would become a throughline in Barber’s career. She credits both athletics and her parents with giving her the confidence to try new things without being paralyzed by the possibility of failure.

“My dad was an entrepreneur who started his own film editing business in Chicago, Cutters Inc., when he was 21,” Barber says. “He was very open with us about both the really hard times and the really good ones. I think it taught me not to be afraid to take chances and see where things go. You learn from the mistakes, evolve, and keep moving forward.”

Barber’s path to Australia began, improbably enough, back at Miami. One of Barber’s closest friends, Katherine Knab Olsen, was enrolled in the university’s five-year architecture program and spent her final year at the University of Sydney, where she met Nicholas. She later introduced the two in New York.

Barber and Nicholas were friends for years before reconnecting in 2015. After spending time in New York and Chicago, they moved to Sydney with their first son, Wylder, allowing Nicholas to focus on DUNLIN, the company he had founded in Australia in 2010.

Barber didn’t immediately step into the business. Instead, she launched J’Jute, a collection of luxury baskets she and Nicholas designed and had handmade in India. Building the brand gave her firsthand experience in product development, e-commerce, marketing, and public relations—and the confidence to envision what she might contribute to DUNLIN.

“I did everything,” she says. “I had to trust my instincts as I put things out into the world. Getting our product into goop, the brand founded by Gwyneth Paltrow, reinforced that. You take a chance, you ask the question, and you see where it leads. The worst someone can say is ‘no.’”

After J’Jute found success, Barber made her case for joining DUNLIN.

“I deeply respected what Nic had built, and I felt I had fresh ideas I could bring to the brand,” she says. “We had a similar perspective on the path for DUNLIN. Nic had always wanted to design his own lighting, so in many ways the foundations of what DUNLIN could become were already there.”

The couple saw an opportunity to expand DUNLIN’s offerings and develop an original lighting collection that would combine Nicholas’s architectural expertise with Barber’s artistic instincts, brand experience, and understanding of the customer. Today, the pair designs every DUNLIN piece together. Design comes first for both of them: the form, the proportion, how it functions, and most importantly, whether it offers something new. Their individual instincts may differ along the way, but the process and the final piece are entirely shared.

As director, Barber manages DUNLIN’s international brand partnerships, while the decision of which brands to represent is made together. “We consider what each brand brings to the wider DUNLIN world,” she says. “It’s less about adding more, and more about choosing what genuinely belongs.”

Among DUNLIN’s most significant relationships is its role as the exclusive Australian home of acclaimed British designer Rose Uniacke’s lighting, furniture, fabric, and home collections.

“It has been incredible to introduce these pieces in a way that allows clients to experience them in person and see how they feel in an Australian home,” Barber says. “We partner with brands based on what we genuinely love and whether they have a meaningful place at DUNLIN.”

That philosophy comes to life at DUNLIN Elizabeth Street, the appointment-only showroom the couple opened in 2026 inside a Paddington terrace house. Rather than a traditional retail environment, the space feels like an artfully composed home, inviting clients to slow down and experience each piece.

“We wanted to create something warm, personal, and inspiring—a space where we could build long-term relationships with our clients,” Barber says.

After a decade in Sydney, Barber now calls Bondi home with Nicholas and their sons, Wylder, 9, and Melrose, 6. Australia’s slower pace and deep connection to the outdoors initially required an adjustment, but she has grown to embrace both.

Still, Winnetka remains an important part of the family’s life. They return each summer, often in time for July Fourth—filling their visits with family, friends, golf, tennis, trips to the Art Institute of Chicago, lunch at RL, and Lou Malnati’s pizza. Her boys are especially fascinated by two distinctly Midwestern sights: deer and squirrels. “We don’t have squirrels where we live,” Barber says with a laugh. “My boys are completely fascinated by these weird little creatures. It’s lovely that both Australia and the U.S. feel like home to us, and yet there are still so many little surprises to discover in each.”

Barber also continues to draw inspiration from her mother, whose ever-evolving interiors first sparked her love of design.

“My mom has this incredibly artistic side, but she’s also very strategic and analytical,” Barber explains. “They can feel like two completely different ways of thinking, and the overlap isn’t always obvious. I think I inherited that from her, this ability to move between the creative and the strategic.”

Looking ahead, she and Nicholas are less interested in chasing every possibility than in nurturing what they have built so far.

“There are so many things we could be doing,” Barber says. “But we are trying to remain focused on what DUNLIN is right now, supporting the brands we represent, developing our own collection, and doing everything with care.”

To learn more about DUNLIN, visit dunlin.com.au.