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Cool-toned industrial materials such as aluminium and concrete are paired with marble surfaces and translucent pastel shelving in this eyewear store in Melbourne, Australia. More
Australian studio Pattern has teamed industrial grey bricks, concrete and steel with warm-toned timber in the interior of this poolside restaurant on the outskirts of Melbourne. More
Architect Murray Barker and artist Esther Stewart worked together to retrofit this two-bedroom 1960s apartment in Melbourne’s Brunswick neighbourhood using colours and materials that pay homage to the original mid-century interior.When the current owners bought the walk-up apartment, it had been empty for 20 years and had its original decor including linoleum and carpet floors and salmon pink walls. The owners wanted to retain its character while updating the living spaces to suit modern life.
Built in 1961, the 65-square-metre apartment is split into two zones with a living space and kitchen at the front on either side of the entrance and two bedrooms on either side of a bathroom at the rear.
A skylight lets light into the kitchen
“The apartment’s layout was typical of many apartments of this typology, with a clear division between living and private spaces and with frontage on two sides,” Barker told Dezeen.
“We wanted to retain room divisions, but at the same time improve connections, extend sightlines and bring more natural light into the kitchen.”
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The apartment’s original large windows provided ample natural light and effective cross ventilation. The owners felt that the existing kitchen, however, felt disconnected from the living room as the space was too confined to accommodate a dining table and lacked adequate natural light.
To remedy this, Barker and Stewart reconfigured the plan to improve the connection between the living room and the kitchen.
The Pistacho-coloured kitchen has a terrazzo floor
The dividing walls between the two rooms were partially demolished and joinery elements were inserted to reorder circulation paths between the home’s central entrance, the reoriented kitchen and the living room.
“We expanded the use of integrated joinery, considered existing proportions and details, and the use of high quality, robust but interesting materials,” said Murray.
The interior of the cabinets is a rich terracotta colour
The new kitchen layout has an L-shaped plan that is open to the living area and anchored by a custom-made steel frame table with a Rosa Alicante marble top and fixed banquette seating.
Visible from the living room, a long kitchen countertop made from the same red marble as the table completes the L-shaped kitchen plan and incorporates a stove, oven and sink.
Red marble was used across the work- and tabletops
A skylight above the kitchen table lets sunlight into the space through thick glass roof tiles. The ceiling is insulated and the roof window is double-glazed to minimise additional heat gain and to retain winter warmth.
Murray and Stewart selected the pistachio green colour for the joinery in a nod to the original 1960s-era kitchen that it replaced. Details include visible framing around doors and drawers and custom finger pulls. Sliding-pocket doors reveal a hidden appliance area in the pantry to hold a toaster, kettle and coffee machine.
Barker and Stewart retained the apartment’s original 1960s bathroom
The apartment’s bathroom is the 1960s original and features speckled flooring, dusty pink tiles and baby blue sanitaryware.
“Each apartment in the block has a unique toilet, bath and sink set in contrasting colour palettes, in combination with unique terrazzo flooring in the bathroom,” Murray explained. “The interior materiality was specific and robust but enthusiastic and this was something we wished to explore and elaborate upon.”
The terrazzo floor tiles that are used across the rest of the apartment were salvaged excess stock from a larger project and were chosen to complement the original floors.
The apartment is housed in a typical red brick complex
“These buildings are visually robust, but there is beauty in the material nuance of the brown brick and subtle ornamentation through the considered design of ordinary things,” he continued. “The original interior aesthetic was far from white walls and plain tiles.”
Last year, London studio Archmongers renovated a duplex mid-century flat in one of the city’s most well-known housing estates, using shades of red, yellow and blue to complement the modernist material palette. Meanwhile in Rome, Italian architecture office La Macchina Studio renovated a 1950s apartment, revealing original terrazzo floors and adding bold colours.
Photography is by Benjamin Hosking.
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Melbourne-based interior design studio Biasol used earthy hues and stylised architectural motifs to create a destination inspired by Wes Anderson’s symmetry and nostalgic colour palette.The Budapest Cafe in Carlton, Melbourne is Biasol’s second edition of its Wes Anderson-informed concept, following a first location in Chengdu, China, that featured marble surfaces and pale pastel greens.
The 94 square-metre cafe has similar pastel shades, but in earthy colours that have been adapted to its Carlton setting and audience.
Top image: counter sits within focal archway. Above image: the studio cover walls with earthy shades
“Our design draws on Anderson’s meticulous, memorable and magical worlds to create an inviting destination with whimsical character and mythical scenes,” Biasol founder Jean-Pierre Biasol told Dezeen.
“We were also inspired by his symmetry and quirky set designs; vivid and nostalgic colour palettes; and the sentiment that infuses his films,” Biasol continued.
Caned chairs and banquette seating fill the space
The studio played with depth by applying dark tones like terracotta and orange to the walls, while softer beige and sand hues blanket the fanciful elements in the foreground – including focal archways reminiscent of Wes Anderson’s 2014 feature film, The Grand Budapest Hotel.
“We evolved the design and experience to an earthy colour palette reflecting our local sensibilities,” Biasol explained.
Rust-red upholstered banquettes wrap around the space, adding texture and warmth to the double-height space, and envelop a bar table that functions as the centre of the seating area.
Architectural motifs decorate the walls
A large sand-textured archway frames a glossy, tubular point-of-sale counter in terracotta, both of which draw customers through the space. Subtle silver hardware, meanwhile, provides a bright, metallic contrast to the softer tones.
The studio’s fondness for modern abstract art, design, and hospitality informed its decision to create “an immersive gallery-like experience,” Biasol said.
This led to an exploration of form and colour, with the aim of designing a place where art meets architecture.
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By reducing the interior’s built form, the studio created a dramatic visual aesthetic. Stylised steps to nowhere embellish the venue’s walls, rising behind the tubular counter framed within arched alcoves and encouraging patrons to engage with and capture the “imaginative and evocative” design.
Appliances contrast the earthy setting
“With a richer palette and bolder design, the new cafe is timeless and contemporary for its Melbourne patrons, while still offering a relaxed and indulgent atmosphere and hospitality experience,” Biasol said.
The Budapest Cafe is one of many projects the studio have completed globally. In 2019 Biasol completed contemporary dining spaces for Grind in southeast London, as well the interiors for this east London townhouse.
Photography is by Derek Swalwell.
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Architecture practice Freadman White has created an apartment block in Melbourne’s Fitzroy neighbourhood, finishing its interiors with gleaming brass accents.The Napier Street apartments were designed by Freadman White for property developers Milieu. It is situated directly beside Whitlam Place, another residential block designed by the practice.
The Napier Street apartment block has a simple off-white facade
Whilst Whitlam Place has a green-hued exterior clad with corrugated panels of oxidised copper, Napier Street features a plain off-white facade punctuated by wide windows.
Freadman White creates new layout for extended 1930s house in Melbourne
Freadman White says the building’s pared-back aesthetic draws inspiration from Heide II – a modernist Melbourne home designed in 1963 by Australian architects David McGlashan and Neil Everist, which has masonry walls and expansive panels of glazing.
Rooms feature concrete ceilings and oak floors
An equally refined material palette has been applied throughout the interiors of Napier Street’s 14 apartment units. Each home boasts oak flooring and exposed concrete ceilings, which rise up to 2.9 metres in height.
Kitchens have been finished with wooden cabinetry, white-tile splashbacks and countertops crafted from pale Elba stone.
Brass shelving and door handles have been incorporated throughout
There are some decadent touches in the apartments – for example, some of the bedrooms are closed off by glossy, full-height black doors.
Golden-hued brass has also been used to create door handles, shelves and vanity units inside the bathrooms, which are otherwise lined with grey terrazzo tiles.
Glossy black doors conceal the apartments’ bedrooms
Elements in the apartment block’s communal areas such as the front gate and mailboxes are also made out of brass.
“Napier Street is a symphony of robust materiality displaying organic, muted beauty carried from the exterior through to the interior experience,” concluded the practice, which is led by Ilana Freadman and Michael White.
More brass detailing appears in the terrazzo-lined bathrooms
Freadman White’s Napier Street and Whitlam Place projects both made it to the longlist of this year’s Dezeen Awards. The practice has previously renovated a 1930s home in Melbourne’s Elsternwick neighbourhood to include an angular grey-brick extension.
Photography is by Gavin Green.
Project credits:
Client: Milieu PropertyBuilder: Atelier ProjectsStyling: Hub Furniture
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Towering, pale wood volumes hide the functional elements of this apartment in Melbourne, Australia which has been overhauled by local architecture studio Edition Office.The Melburnian Apartment – which is shortlisted in the apartment interior category of this year’s Dezeen Awards – is set within a residential building in the Southbank neighbourhood, overlooking the city’s arts precinct and royal botanical gardens.
Prior to Edition Office’s intervention, it had featured several rectilinear rooms that were awkwardly crammed into the apartment’s crescent-shaped floor plan.
The Melburnian Apartment is arranged around volumes made from oak wood
The studio was asked by the young couple who own the apartment to create a less restrictive, easy-going layout that was more suited to their often unpredictable social lives.
After knocking through a majority of the existing plaster-board partition walls, Edition Office decided to tuck away the functional elements of the home inside a trio of full-height storage volumes.
A kitchen is hidden behind one of the volumes
“The design response is inherently simple, refined and calming – which restores and creates freedom,” explained the studio.
“Circulation drifts and flows around the formal partitioning elements, allowing for a space with no doors,” it added. “In this way, the clients move from sleep to morning coffee to home office to showering to washing to working to thinking in a continually evolving and smooth loop.”
White oak wood lines the outside of the volumes. Photo is by Kim Bridgland of Edition Office
Each of the rounded volumes are externally lined with oiled white oak wood, while the insides are clad with grey granite tiles – two materials that the studio thought would offset the apartment building’s “textural aloofness”.
One of the volumes contains a kitchen, which has been minimally finished with handleless timber cupboards. The second volume has been in-built with a sofa upholstered in tan-brown leather and a small desk, which are meant to have the same feel as a study cubicle in a library.
The inside of the volumes are clad with granite tiles
The third and final volume has been made to curve around a freestanding desk to form a larger home office. Several steel shelves have been incorporated so that the inhabitants have a place to display their wide array of novels.
An additional bathroom is also integrated into the back of this volume, which is almost entirely covered with slim white tiles. It also includes a marble-effect vanity cabinet.
Another one of the volumes curves around a study with steel bookshelves. Photo is by Kim Bridgland of Edition Office
Edition Office has carefully arranged the volumes to provide shade to living spaces, which were often flooded with sunlight from the floor-to-ceiling window that curves around the apartment’s front elevation.
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“Their curved forms invite light and shadow to drift and smear around corners, and allow for a home that has too much natural daylight to provide the sanctuary of shadow and the textural delight that comes with it,” added the studio.
The volumes also block sightlines to the master bedroom in the corner of the apartment, which is simply separated from the rest of the plan by a raw-linen curtain.
This volume also includes a white-tile bathroom
Edition Office was established in 2016 and is led by Kim Bridgland and Aaron Roberts. The studio was named as emerging architect of the year in the 2019 Dezeen Awards.
In this year’s awards, its Melburnian Apartment will compete against projects such as La Nave by Nomos, a flat in Madrid that occupies an abandoned workshop, and Jaffa House 4 by Pitsou Kedem Architects, an apartment that’s set inside a 300-year-old brick building in Tel Aviv.
Photography is by Ben Hosking unless stated otherwise.
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A chunky, wedge-shaped island crafted from plaster and beeswax anchors the sparse interior of this pop-up library, shop and exhibition space that design studio Pattern has created in Canberra.The temporary library is situated in the trendy suburb of Braddon and belongs to new Australian wellness brand Adytum, which produces eco-conscious self-care products such as teas, face oils and bath soaks.
Adytum Library is anchored by a huge island
Although the brand is set to open the doors to its first spa in 2021, it was keen to conceive a slightly different style of wellness space that instead celebrates books and the “intellectual nourishment one receives from the written word”.
Sydney-based studio Pattern – which is also developing the interiors of Adytum’s spa – was asked to design the library. The brand’s key request was that the pop-up had minimal environmental impact.
Books and products from Adytum are displayed across the island
With this in mind, Pattern ditched the idea of overhauling the entire retail unit and instead created just one striking element – a huge wedge-shaped island that sits at the centre of the floor plan, built around two existing structural columns.
“While we didn’t have a tenancy of cathedral-like proportions to work with, we drew inspiration from the concepts of purity, simplicity, and clarity often found in religious architectural spaces,” Pattern’s co-founder, Lily Goodwin, told Dezeen.
Incense is burned in the pop-up throughout the day
The island, which gradually tapers off to a narrow point, has a reclaimed MDF frame that’s been covered with natural plaster and finished with a coating of beeswax.
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An array of design, architecture and art titles are displayed across the surface, which can be purchased by visitors or borrowed via Adytum’s membership scheme. The books are softly illuminated by a couple of white table lamps by Danish brand Hay which have been dotted across the island.
There is also a handful of Adytum’s products, including incense sticks that will be burnt throughout the day.
Adytum Library also exhibits work by Australian artists
The outer periphery of Adytum Library is used to display works from Australian artists Traianos Pakioufakis and Alana Wilson.
Pakioufakis’s expansive photographic prints are draped across bent copper pipes that were found in construction site waste, while Wilson’s collection of ceramic vessels – which have been darkened with metal-oxide glazes – perch on rough plinths that the studio salvaged from a local stonemason.
Artworks are displayed on stone plinths or copper pipes
Pattern was established in 2016 by Lily Goodwin and Josh Cain. Previous projects by the studio include Locura, a cocktail and small-plates bar in Byron Bay that’s meant to evoke the “raw beauty” of late-night eateries in Mexico.
It also created rose-tinted interiors for The Daily Edited, an accessories shop in Melbourne.
Photography is by Traianos Pakioufakis.
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The rustic materiality of this Melbourne cafe designed by architecture studio Ritz & Ghougassian is meant to reflect the fuss-free dishes on the menu.Prior is situated along the lively high street of Melbourne’s Thornbury suburb, taking over a building that once served as an industrial printing house.
Prior cafe occupies a building that was once a printing house
When Ritz & Ghougassian were brought on board to develop the interiors of the cafe, it stripped back any decorative elements left behind from the old fit-out, only preserving the brick walls and eight-metre-high truss ceiling.
“It was clear to us that we had to honour the original space by proposing an intervention that sat apart from the original framework of the building,” the studio’s co-founder, Jean-Paul Ghougassian, told Dezeen.
Bricks cover the cafe’s floor and the base of the service bar
The space now features just a handful of elements made from unfussy materials that reflect the simple “paddock-to-plate” ethos that Prior applies to its menu.
Bricks run across the floor and form the base of the service bar that lies on one side of the room.
Concrete and terrazzo furniture feature in Ritz&Ghougassian’s minimal cafe interior
Apricot-hued concrete forms the upper half of the bar and the chunky ledge that runs around its outer side, providing a place for customers to rest beverages or snacks.
The hot drinks menu is presented on a mirrored panel behind the bar. It stands beside a single shelf that displays a curated selection of wine or bags of coffee which are available to buy.
Apricot-hued concrete forms the top of the service bar
“Honest, elegant and refined flavours informed the built environment; by taking a reductive approach to the design both in materiality and form ultimately allowed the food to be the hero,” Ghougassian explained.
“Rather than simply creating a slick new eatery, there’s a warmth and richness to the space, celebrating the unevenness and rough textures of the walls and floors.”
Seating throughout the cafe is crafted from Australian Blackbutt wood
Customers can alternatively dine at the black-steel counters that have been built into the cafe’s front windows or along the seating banquette that runs along the far side of the room, upholstered in chestnut-brown leather.
The banquette faces onto a row of dining tables which, along with the cafe’s bench-style seats and stools, have been crafted from Australian Blackbutt wood.
“Like much of our work, using materials that are locally sourced and manufactured is important to us – this brings about an authenticity and specificity to the design that isn’t easily replicated,” added Ghougassian.
There’s also a brown-leather seating banquette
At the centre of the floor plan is a box filled with timber logs and a wood burner that the studio hopes will serve as a comforting focal point of the cafe, especially during the chilly winter months.
Surrounding walls and the ceiling were freshened up with a coat of white paint.
A wood burner sits at the centre of the cafe
Ritz & Ghougassian was founded in 2016 by Jean-Paul Ghougassian and Gilad Ritz. Prior isn’t the only cafe that the studio has designed in its home city of Melbourne – back in 2018 it completed Bentwood, which boasts brick-red interiors.
In 2017, the studio also created Penta, a minimal cafe that features concrete, terrazzo and silver-metal surfaces.
Photography is by Tom Ross.
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