Willougby home owner's floral shirt inspires a dazzling pink-themed redecoration

Having loved the ‘industrial loft’ look she’d seen in New York, Brett Mickan’s soon-to-be client returned to Sydney and added a rear extension to her Willougby Federation semi. 

It ended up with exposed recycled brickwork built from the partial demolition of the old building, glass brick insertions and spaces that flow into the back garden.

When asked to redecorate the living areas, inspiration for Mickan came from “looking at the client and seeing a beautiful tailored girlyness about her.

“She was wearing an embroidered, tailored floral blouse,” he recalls. 

Working from that, Mickan brought the “warm tones out in the brickwork” by emphasising an unusually strong cluster of colourations, including terracotta, brown, turquoise and pink – lots of different pinks.

The result is a unique version of New York loft style that he says is essentially about “beautiful objects and forms and textures. A bit of old and a bit of new”.

It is also about imperfection, which is why he started with a vintage Moroccan rug “that was all about texture”, and that as a cumulative experience, adds up to a visual hug “without it being too Barbie”.

To add some neutrality, the designer threw in “a grey linen sofa with baseball stitching detail, a leather swivel chair and a coffee table made of copper”.

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But multiple variations on that soft secondary shade do show up. It’s in different fabrics on the cushions, the reupholstered Swedish 1950s lounge chairs, in “the anchor rug”; in the little girls’ breakout workstation area “where they can do their artwork on their little Ikea pink chairs”, and even in the neon touches on “the simple, classic stools” at the kitchen bench. 

There is a lot that is pink and it’s gorgeous.

Unless you were really confident with pushing such a hue to such an extent in a small room, it does take a designer’s skill to pull it off and make it look, as Mickan wants it to appear, more as if it was an accidental accumulation of elements and items, reflecting his client rather than him.

“I don’t want the spaces to look too designed.”

It must have worked. Soon after the project was completed, a photograph of “the pinkest place I’ve ever done” appeared on social media and was forwarded to this client by a friend with the recommendation: “I think this would really suit your place”.