Renovation of mid-century Brisbane apartment celebrates the detail

Choosing to stay near the CBD, and as their first home to upgrade a unit in Brisbane’s first residential high-rise, Vokes and Peters architect Aaron Peters and partner Rebecca Pouwer, bought themselves a one-bedroom apartment.

With architect fees waived, they had enough left in the kitty for the renovations.

They liked mid-century and Torbeck, built in 1959-60, was well maintained – from the outside. Their 11th-level unit with south-west outlooks still had some of “the solid masonry internal walls, and the different spaces and light of the era”.

But apart from the tiled bathroom and toilet floors, the rest “had been obliterated”.

Whoever owned it previously had ripped out walls between kitchen, dining and living room to make one big space. Peters chose to partially reinstate the partitions.

He also introduced a shallow, one-step change in floor level between sitting and dining room before re-flooring the place in Blackbutt parquetry.

That terrain change, the new room dividers and the wide variety of alcoves and shelf spaces that have all manner of functions but that actually deal with making less intrusive the exposed structural elements that are, to him, “the flaws” of Torbeck’s interiors, reintroduced some nicely nuanced spaces to the pad.

The floor level differential suggested “a sunken lounge that was a little echo of mid century” and made the floor plane, “less monotonous”. The walls were about “making more distinct rooms”. The alcoves now frame a bedroom bookshelf, a day-bed “which is a lovely cosy space”, and make handy shelves in the bathroom and toilet that have both scored retiled walls to match the floors, “the only original fabric”.

Besides such amendments, it is the fine-lens detailing of this architect’s own home that is so charming – without it ever becoming sentimental replication. The Blackbutt veneered cupboards in kitchen and bathroom concertina in a slight chevron pattern.

“I was looking at the motifs of the era,” Peters says, “and chevrons are very mid-century Californian”.

Indeed, many elements of the fit-out are so suitable to the spaces that “at first glance they look like they’ve been there forever. People are always asking if they are original.”

At second glance, you see the architect at play. Into what was a previously dark vestibule he introduced an opening wall hatch that looks through the bedroom to mountain views.

It is wonderful, Peters concludes “to be able to custom tailor a home to a very minute level to the way you want to live.”

“Things that aren’t really that remarkable at first turn out to be very enriching”.