Adding style and substance
The owner of an eight-year-old house on a great block with a tennis court and swimming pool in Melbourne’s Brighton, walks into an interior design firm with a pressing problem that she needs to have solved.
A woman of innate style by birth and profession, French textile designer Ghabida McGrath asks Fiona Austin whether her house with the good bones but bad layout – and a sense of having been done on the cheap, according to Austin – could be remediated?
“She wanted things to feel more solid and have really good quality”, says the designer. “She wanted better space planning and texture and better access to the outdoors”.
Pushing and pulling the floorplan “a metre here and a metre there that made all the difference”; removing a peculiarly placed void above the kitchen that leaked noise and cooking smells into upstairs bedrooms; replacing the tennis court with a relocated new pool and garden, and, most critically, putting a big beam in to enable two discordant spaces to become one “grand and spacious living room”, Austin Design Associate refurbished the Hamptons-style weatherboard into a sophisticated setting for the effortlessly chic lifestyle of Mrs McGrath and her family.
From the floor up – replaced by French, grey-toned oak, to the new staircase, stone chimney breast, new slabs of marble in the kitchen, new appointments in the four same-same schemed bathrooms with their herringbone floors and timber-look tiles, and with all new wood-framed replacement windows, Austin says her client “really pushed us to explore as many options and materials as possible”.
Pushing builder David Pontifex just as hard, all that was insubstantial was supplanted, and the fine detailing of a scheme that combines soft greys, linens, crisp white trims and pretty powerful key points of black, (down to door hinges and heating panels), the home was born again “with a freshness and a lightness that makes it more contemporary.
“And everything about it is much more generous”, says the interior designer. “It feels like a new house.”
“Our job really was to get the fundamentals and the space planning right. It was a classic interior design task. She finished it off so that it is not cluttered and not pretty but very strong and very stylish”.
“It was great to work with someone who took ideas and really ran with them and Ghabida uses the house as a backdrop for her wonderful collections. She is constantly changing her artwork, and constantly moving things around.”
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