Inside Chelsea Morley's dream Melbourne home - complete with pink kitchen

Chelsea Morley is in the business of creating a scene – the good, calming kind – not the drama-fuelled kind you secretly pine for while watching your favourite reality TV show.

As the founder and creative director of Tiny Disco, an advertising and content agency she runs alongside her husband, Stuart, Morley knows it’s character that drives any story – even your property search.

“I knew I wanted something that had a lot of character,” says Morley.

Morley and her husband were searching for a home for their young family that would grow with them through various life stages, while being close to work and school. They eventually found their dream home in Melbourne’s Windsor, but at first glance Morley almost dismissed it.

“This one came up online and I was like ‘that’s not the one’, but my husband still went to check it out – then he came home and was like ‘I think you need to see it’,” explains Morley.

After being convinced to inspect the house, Morley’s tune quickly changed – she could see the four-bedroom home’s potential. While the interiors of the Edwardian home were dated, the period charm of the building – from the ornate ceiling roses to stained-glass bay windows – was impossible to resist. “It just felt like it was meant to be our house,” she says.

The Morleys have now lived in their home for two and a half years and have drastically changed the look and feel of the property, doing most of the work themselves.

“The house really is the complete polar opposite to what it was when we bought it,” says Morley. “The interiors were dark, there was deep red carpet everywhere, really dark red curtains, the house needed a bit of a revamp.”

Morley’s approach was to strip the home back to basics. “The first day we got the keys I got a Stanley knife and just started ripping up all the carpet, my husband freaked out and I was like there’s no way we’re not going to have these original floorboards,” explains Morley, who then restored them.

Saying goodbye to the burgundy walls came next with the only paint colour that had the chops to give this home a fresh start – white. “My mum always taught me once you get in a space and live in it you just want to splash it with white so you can see how the space lives.”

There was one exception to this all-white rule – the kitchen, which Morley painted pink. “Pink is my joy colour. I have a setting on Marketplace for pink or pastel furniture – it’s a problem!” she confesses.

“We couldn’t afford to renovate the kitchen, so one weekend I painted the kitchen pink and installed new handles.”

Morley’s love of pink extends to a pink marble dinner table (which she jokingly refers to as her “third child”), and even Tiny Disco’s brand colour is pink.

A self-proclaimed “DIY girl”, Morley has given new life to the bathrooms with a low-key makeover, in which she painted the tiles and updated the fixtures.

Other previous updates include updating the garden and one of the family’s favourite rooms, “the library” (which also moonlights as a spare room for visiting relatives and work-from-home office space). This room, replete with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, is filled with the family’s book collection – and while it has no Dewey Decimal System in place, books are regularly borrowed from its shelves by friends and loved ones.

“It was my dream to have a library and it’s honestly the thing that I saw and fell in love instantly – this big beautiful, huge room with shelves,” explains Morley. “I want to be an old woman surrounded by my books, and every night the kids run into the room and choose their books to read.”

For Morley, a home isn’t just the walls of a structure; it’s people and memories that live within it. “I’m big on the people and my children, and having their drawings on the walls, conversations around the table and creating this atmosphere of living,” she says.

After

Before

“I am not a perfect show home person, I really like seeing a little bit of mess or Texta on the table after my kids have done a really beautiful picture, I think that adds to so much to the home.”

And of course, someone in Morley’s profession, she’s big on creating a mood. You can expect the windows open all summer, candles flickering all winter, and the family playlist humming in the background – always.