Project . Middle Park
Location . Melbourne, Australia
Size . 4 bedroom residence
Scope . Selected-room interior design and furnishing, with Ask Us Anything support during construction.
Middle Park is a study in constraints made purposeful. The renovation was already underway when we were brought in. The owners had been making decisions room by room - each sound on its own, yet arrived somewhere none of it added up. What they lacked wasn't taste. It was a single vision aligned between the two owners, strong enough to hold the whole house together. The constraint was absolute: no structural change, no walls moved. A mid-2000s white box with expansive views over the bay, and nothing to work with but surface, material, furniture, objects and light.
The palette was built to move with the water. Soft ivory walls, light oak, Taj Mahal marble and a warm bone micro-cement that shifts through the day as the light comes off the bay. Against it, texture does the warming — oak, boucle, velvet, sheepskin, soft hand-tufted rugs underfoot, with turmeric, burgundy and chocolate in small, deliberate doses. The chrome came with the house. Original to it, and costly to remove, which in most schemes makes it something to work around; here it became the thread instead, repeated through tapware, table legs, chair frames and lighting until it reads as a decision rather than a leftover. Calacatta Viola and Rosso Levanto sit alongside it, pulling the whole thing back into contrast before it can turn soft.
The apartment is vast, and much of the work was holding that scale while making it feel like somewhere you'd actually settle. The second living room was the clearest case - oversized, and until now a thoroughfare. It does two things now. At one end, a den for a small group: guitars on the wall, a fire lit, music on, a drink poured from the mirrored bar cabinet. At the other, a study. The desk is artful yet wide enough to work at properly. A space zoned to focus, lit by layered lighting so it holds up at six in the morning and at eleven at night.
The main suite is well proportioned yet feels intimate through the treatment of surfaces and lighting. A deep chocolate velvet bedhead, an Icelandic sheepskin underfoot, lighting layered so it can come down to almost nothing. The palette stays soft and neutral throughout, so the room feels settled at waking and again at the end of the day. Above the bed hang a pair of framed paper carvings, on the adjacent wall, a waved mirror that brings a touch of quirk. Both kept from the owner’s original collection, and informed everything decorative that followed.
These are photorealistic visuals, not photographs. Every Design Services project includes them, so you can see how the whole scheme works together, and change your mind if needed, before anything is built.
before, and after.
A glimpse of the deliverables.
Every design service project includes a complete documentation package — mood boards, material and finish schedules and curated product lists you and your trades could work directly from.
