Mohana Aspillaga
There's something special about a life spent always leaving half your heart somewhere else. Peru, Bali, Europe, Australia. I carry all of them at once. Every road I've travelled shapes who I am, how I show up every day, and the way I create spaces.
Right now that's my life in Northern NSW. Beach walks, hinterland light, a kitchen that has to work as good as it looks, a deadline, my beautiful clients, multiple languages to navigate, a glass of something at 6pm looking at a wall of trees. Mum life, professional life, and still trying to understand the jokes of my amazing Aussie friends who've become family here. MOA Interiors comes out of all this beauty and contrast, not a moodboard, an actual life, actually being lived in the spaces I create.
But go back far enough, and this all starts on a beach in Peru.
My dad was a pro surfer, and my mum was brave. They had a big vision for how to create their life instead of letting life decide for them, and moved us from all the comforts of the city to a small, remote surf town. We spent everything he had on a piece of land in front of one of the best left-handed waves in the country, and had nothing left over to build the house. So, since the roof is one of the most expensive parts of any build, they left it out. Two storeys, in a house shaped like a pyramid, with no roof, of course. Every space in that little house had to work double duty, and somehow it held all the comfort of a much bigger house, the coziest place on earth. Still, what mattered most, always, was the connection: to nature, to the elements, to the view.
Then we'd drive back into the city, and a completely different life would be waiting. A driver, staff, marble, city and mountain houses built for people who never had to think twice about what a space could do for them. I grew up crossing that line constantly, always clocking how interesting it was. One side taught me to make more out of less. The other taught me what more actually looks like, up close. I think MOA Interiors still lives exactly in between those two worlds.
My parents meant to name me Moana, the Hawaiian deep blue ocean, but my dad wrote Mohana instead (men!!). Friends shortened it over the years, the way friends do, and Moa is what stuck. I didn't choose it. It just arrived, the way the best things usually do.
Where it's taken me.
I lead MOA Interiors and MOA Curations now, treating a space and the furniture inside it as one idea, not two separate jobs. My husband and I also run Wak'a Designs together, an architecture and interior design studio in Lennox Head, with our team, where the two disciplines are worked out side by side from the first sketch.
Practices sometimes bring me in directly too, to help organise a team, lead the interiors, and manage the client relationship when that support is needed.
Before Wak'a Designs, I led concept through documentation on multi-million-dollar homes in Byron Bay.
Further back is Perú: creative direction and FF&E for an award-winning beachfront resort, and before that, our own villas on the cliffs where I grew up, the first project my husband and I built together as a couple.
It started in Lima, five years working across luxury residential projects, training in interior architecture and commercial interior design along the way. I graduated in interior architecture in Peru and commercial interior design in Sydney, with further qualifications in construction project management and contract administration.
Thirteen years on, and the instinct hasn't moved: a space and what fills it are never really two separate things.