Interior designer Fiona Austin finds her forever house in Beaumaris

With house flipping – renovating and reselling for stacks of cash being an ideal alternative career in the minds of many – what interiors professional Fiona Austin is about to say will sound like heresy.

Having just done her own fifth family home, she reckons she’s done renovating and done roaming.

With at least three of the previous houses she and partner Craig have owned initially looking like forever houses, and then proving limited or limiting – “we grew out of them” – the latest four-bedroom home in Beaumaris is definitely it.

With the 12-year-old architect-designed house with the multiple skillion roofs being oriented north-east and looking directly on to the manicured fairways of Australia’s oldest continuously operating golf club, The Royal Melbourne, “we’d never find a position like this again”, she says.

The couple was considering shifting to Flinders as a future retirement option. “I kept finding nice, single-level, downsizing mid-century houses around here (Beaumaris). But then cost would rear its ugly head. We’d do the sums: You pay, say $1.5 million for the house, then $500,000 to fix it up, and that’s not downsizing.”

Early-modernism enthusiasts, the Austins have already improved two such 60-year-old Bayside residences, so Austin knows what it takes to bring them back to life while respecting viable, original features.

The first classic, originally built in honest, unadorned brick had been rendered “and that changed what it looked like and after a while it drove me crazy”.

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The next was in a quiet court and on a big block, but with two growing sons they needed to extend upwards. “And no one tells you how expensive it is to go up. It costs a bomb.”

So this staunch defender of the last of the important modernist houses in the Bayside did the unthinkable. She went looking for a newer house.

“I wanted one done on mid-century principles but with sustainable credentials.” Designed by an architect for himself, this house “ticked all the boxes except for not being two minutes from the beach”.

Austin says all that needed redoing was the surface-level dressing – stripping off pelmets, changing curtains and carpets and tiles. She introduced a different paint palette, engineered oak flooring, bookcases and portions of wall panelling.

“We love doing kitchens and bathrooms.” So in came fancy new German Blum cabinetry in black laminate. A marble-topped island and stainless steel working bench also appeared. “These are my stamps. Some things are just not negotiable.”

Essentially, the Brighton-based interior designer says that for the first time with her own digs all she has had to concern herself with “were all the fun bits”.

From the experience Fiona has some distilled wisdom to share: “I think there’s a lot of opportunity for people to buy 15 to 20-year-old architect-designed houses that are just tired.”

Light touch renovations, she says, “can be a very cost-effective way to get a good house”.