Colourful Togetherness
When the pandemic pushed a challenging DIY renovation off-course, Cantilever’s Interior Service helped exhausted clients get their project back on track with deft, unifying elements that harmonised a disjointed interior. The outcome is a relaxed, light filled family home brimming with colour and sociable spaces for togetherness and the day-to-day rituals that bring them joy.
Project
Bower Street
System
K1 Kitchen System
Service
Joinery + Interiors Service
Location
Victoria
Author
Kath Dolan
Images
Martina Gemmola
Styling by
Kylie Forbes
Key Suppliers Southwood Home
Make Designed Objects
Vasette
Rodwell + Astor Tiento Tiles Marc Pascal Dowel Jones About Space
The renovation of this inner-city Edwardian began with some remarkable good fortune and plenty of promise. First, a couple who’d met in London put down roots unexpectedly in Melbourne’s inner north thanks to a sociable neighbourhood and enduring friendships that still sustain them and their now teenage children. Then, at the precise moment they reluctantly began house-hunting further afield for a home they could afford to buy, the neighbour who’d bought a shabby Edwardian they’d once contemplated bidding on knocked on the window of their rental with an offer too good to refuse. “I’d just come back from a ‘rekkie’ of Preston and Coburg and she said, ‘Do you want to buy our house? We’ll let you pay what we paid for it three years ago.’ They were going to renovate but they’d found a house and had to decide (on it) really quickly.”
So the clients moved their young family in and, for five years, made do with a leaky, dark, narrow place full of potential and hand-me-down furniture to save for a reno of their own. The pair “looked at loads of things and talked to loads of architects and builders” before deciding to design a compact double-storey addition and project manage it themselves. Going up “is just because I’m English and that’s what you’d do in England,” she says. “Now we’ve done it I know why you don’t go up in this kind of house: they weren’t built properly. Some of this was literally held up with a door wedge and rubble. They were just built with whatever people had at the time … so they’re a bit crumbly, and it’s tricky.”
The brief was straightforward. “I wanted something attic-ey (for the upstairs bedrooms),” she says. “We wanted to be as sustainable as we could be within an old house, and we didn’t want to lose the garden. I knew I wanted an indoor-outdoor (living-dining) space at the rear where we were really connected to the garden. And we wanted to keep some of the Edwardian-Victorian (features).” Yep, both. Previous renovations had “messed” with heritage features and flow, creating a disjointed interior unsure of its current identity. “I would say there were about four houses here,” she says.
Construction was underway and Covid pressures hitting local trades by the time the couple turned to Cantilever for a kitchen, pronto. Recommendations from friends and designers alike led them to the Brunswick showroom, where the K1 System’s classic style and accessibility caught their eye. “We chose K1 because we’d overspent on loads of things,” the client concedes, “but actually I really like the basic system. It’s classic and it’s beautiful.”
“I said to Kylie, ‘I think you’re an angel who came along just when I needed it,’ recalls the client with a laugh. “I mean it. Thank God for Interior Designers. We were just so over it. It was really lovely having that new energy and getting excited again about the things I really love, which is colour and choices and pretty things.” Lis _Client
They recognised an astute design team they could trust, and enlisted Cantilever’s Interior Design + Joinery Service for unifying elements in living, dining, bedroom, bathroom and laundry spaces too. They credit these with bringing their vision to life just as they’d reached the limits of their design expertise and succumbed to analysis paralysis.
The team empathised immediately with their clients’ initial overwhelm. “Selecting a project’s finishes and fixtures often sounds fun but it can become nerve-wracking and time-consuming, which is why we initiated our Interiors Service, to compliment our Joinery,” Kylie says.
While discussing colourways, materials and features to accommodate practicalities like book and spice collections and the clients’ preference for washing dishes while looking out towards the garden, Creative Director Kylie Forbes showed these lovers of bold colour how more natural tones like Seed feature laminate on doors and benchtops could harmonise disparate spaces. “We really love (the kitchen) and that’s because of Kylie,” the client says. “We probably would have gone slightly brighter, but that muted cream and grey really works.”
“Kylie also pulled things back a bit. I tend to go for quite bright colours. She muted everything a bit, which is great. I really learned from her. I could see how she was matching things and bringing things together. She gives so many pointers and has such great taste. We would have got somewhere similar (without her), but things would have not quite worked.” Lis _ Client
“Lis and Karl wanted to explore different colour expressions in different zones of the house, so we did, paring back to introduce soft tones that complimented strong ones. Pairing paint tones and tile and grout options with K1’s laminates was a joy.” Kylie _ Cantilever
“We knew there were these four bits of the house that, aesthetically, needed to be pulled together, and I didn’t know how to do it,” the client says. “We sort of knew the colours – there was loads of brick and terracotta, so we’d looked at terracotta tiles – but everything we tried bombed because it was so dark in the middle of the house. We’d looked at so many things and I was like, ‘I don’t know which skirting board,’ she laughs. “It was lovely having someone saying, ‘Do that one’ or ‘’What about this? That would work’.
At the rear, the living room’s long wall-hung display shelf in Hoop pine ply links physically breaks the expanse of white wall, intersecting a human scale to the high pitched void. “The clients are avid readers so, they practically have a library… there are mitred boxes for books at every turn!” Kylie says.
Cantilever custom-made a dining table from timber salvaged on site and paired it with stunning dining seating atop base cabinetry in Seed. Behind is a low, generous display shelf of Hoop pine ply edged with mitred boxes.
Client and designer alike are delighted with the sociability of kitchen and adjacent spaces. “The open plan unity of the living space encourages conversation between zones, with the long bench dining table adjacent, and couches for comfort, not television,” Kylie says.
“A cup of tea at the kitchen bench is a daily ritual the client shares with her teenage sons, allowing a precious debrief before the evening routine consumes. We designed the Island with this in mind.”
Kylie _ Cantilever
“We understood the heritage feature of the front of the home was important to retain and would complement heritage furniture pieces. The front room where the client liked to work during the day was painted a soft blue-grey that filtered up the stairs to engage a natural ‘zoning’. Transitioning to the rear extension was a matter of working the colour transitions down the hallway, and subtly transferring lighting styles. We chose door hardware and cornice, skirting and architrave styles that could sit softly alongside heritage doors and windows, opting to highlight through a classic white trim, which transferred to black aluminium when new.”
K1’s clean lines adapted seamlessly to varied configurations and colourways. Bathroom vanities topped with mirrored cabinetry deploy earthy Kalamata feature Laminex at ground level and serene Green Slate upstairs.
Hallway joinery (which includes a Euro laundry with Gesso clay tile splashback) opens to a side corridor in the home’s now light-filled core, and uses creamy Seed to tie visually to the kitchen.
In a small, striking bedroom of moody blue, a tall robe with a mitred display box of Hoop pine ply accentuates available volume while long low drawers are wall-mounted for shoe storage below.
Kylie’s advice for using colour to unify spaces is to “start with an inspiration point, just one piece of the puzzle, and work from there. For Bower Street, it was the exposed red brick that was visible within each room. I wanted to work with tones that would compliment that red. Colour is like a language, or whispers,” she says. “One word leads to the next and ultimately, all the colours you have in a project need to work together. Put them all on a table and squint to see if they do.”
The clients’ advice for fellow renovators is to “chose the builder that suits the project” and invest your budget strategically in keys to success like insulation, joinery and “someone like Cantilever, who can hold your hand as you make decisions”. “And just know it’ll all be over eventually!” she says.
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