With a love of cooking and entertaining, the homeowners placed great emphasis on the kitchen as a key area of the home, with ample storage and spacious counter tops for food preparation. As they love hosting parties with a large number of guests, a spacious open concept kitchen was decided upon so the homeowners could interact with their guests while preparing food.
The homeowners also desired a spacious and comfortable home theatre/entertainment room for movie nights with family and friends, with an attached powder room for easy access.
Another important request was to brighten up the house by replacing the existing cream tiles used for the flooring in the living areas to bright white marble flooring.
The couple’s two young daughters were to have their own rooms, catering to their very different tastes and styles, so the design team integrated their individual colour choices and concepts into the overall design for their bedrooms.
The open plan living, dining and kitchen area is spacious, with floor to ceiling windows looking onto the garden and full height glass doors allowing guests to spill out to a comfortably furnished courtyard. The main colour scheme selected for the living, dining and kitchen area is white with warm timber elements, including a screen by the front door, to create a bright space that is clean and modern, yet has touches of timber elements, copper pendant lights and patterned rugs give a feeling of warmth and intimacy.
To achieve the bright, airy ambience in the living room, we used luxurious Carrara white marble flooring to brighten up the space, with modern seating in contrasting black and white leather. As the kitchen is an open concept, it was important that the material used in the living room was in keeping with the materials used in the kitchen.
We removed a bathroom adjoining the kitchen area so that we could expand the entire kitchen space to create a dry kitchen and wet kitchen concept and create an open concept kitchen without the space feeling too constricted. A long benchtop serves as a breakfast bar and food preparation/serving area for parties.
The homeowner also had many appliances, including built-in appliances, so we had to ensure that well-designed built-in cabinets fitted two sets of ovens, a microwave, dishwasher and even a built-in coffee machine.
For the kitchen cabinets, we used wood laminate paired with crystal white glass doors to be consistent with the expanse of white marble flooring and timber finishes found in the living room. To add depth and texture to the space, we chose a quartz splashback with a warm-toned marble vein to ensure the space is not too clinically white.
To create separate rooms for the two children, we reduced the size of a family area on the second floor to construct a new bedroom.
The children's rooms were designed using fun colours to suit their individual tastes: a hot pink room that was suited to the liking of a young girl, and a cool monochrome styled room for a teenager.
We used wallpaper so that the daughters could choose their own design in line with their overall colour theme. For the pink bedroom, styled as a princess's room, we used soft curtains to separate the sleeping area from the wardrobe, an ornate French Provincial style bed and fun circle patterned rug. For the monochrome bedroom, we used black and white floral wallpaper to retain a cool and feminine look and feel to the room. Both rooms were also designed to have a built-in dresser with a Hollywood-style mirror edged with lightbulbs.
We concealed the entrance to the home theatre/entertainment room along a timber feature wall for privacy purposes and also as an element of surprise, as this unassuming door leads to the exciting home cinema space.
The interior of the home theatre focuses on grey and darker shades of laminates for the built-in cabinets. To create a cinema feel, we used hidden warm lights and also embedded some coloured lights for alternative use of the space for parties. Dark grey carpet for the floor, grey black-out curtains and comfortable leather seating complete the ultimate movie watching experience.
We wanted the attached powder room to be in keeping with the theme of the home theatre, so we kept to dark grey shades and selected marble vein wall tiles. The vanity cabinet also utilised a dark grey laminate paired with a white quartz benchtop for contrast.
To ensure the lighting of the powder room is not too overpowering or disrupting for other guests when transiting from the home theatre, we used hidden warm crystal lights to illuminate the space with a low glow. The black sinks and basin were also selected to continue the dark theme. A classic vintage-looking mirror belonging to the clients was repurposed in this space, adding a touch of glamour.
