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It wasn’t quite love at first sight for Perth-based architect Rosie Burton, when she first set eyes the 1970s brick-and-tile villa that’s now her Claremont family home.
‘The actual house was nothing special and needed some work, but it was the way all the rooms wrapped around the secluded courtyard garden that won us over,’ Rosie recalls.
‘Mind you, at that time the “garden” was just a sea of concrete pavers with only a couple of surviving plants.’
Most parts of the house needed a facelift, including the kitchen, bathrooms, floors and walls. But by the second viewing, Rosie was convinced by the property’s potential.
‘I had a vision of all the rooms opening out onto a beautiful, leafy secluded garden,’ she says.
‘I believe that one of the most transformative things you can do to a house is to provide access to vibrant outdoor spaces, even if it’s by framing an outlook through a window.
‘The garden was the first thing we tackled after purchasing the property and it immediately transformed the whole experience of living in the house.’
The challenge was that there wasn’t enough space to fit a bobcat into the courtyard, which meant they spent months digging out the raised garden by hand (and taking the soil through the kitchen in wheelbarrows!) before overhauling the landscaping.
For the interiors, Rosie says it didn’t make ‘financial sense’ to change the building footprint or floor plan too much, instead opting for cosmetic changes that made the most of each room.
Some functional swaps involved installing new bi-folding doors to access the outdoors, and moving the entry door to the side of the house. The rest of the renovation took shape in several instalments over the next few years, and while having ‘the luxury of time’ gave the architect plenty of time to experiment and source vintage homewares, it was also a challenge to stick to a cohesive vision.
‘The house is set lower than the neighbours, with ample tree coverage and shade,’ Rosie adds.
‘When a house doesn’t have a lot of natural light, people’s first instinct can be to make everything brighter and whiter, but my strategy has been to bring more warmth and depth.’
The existing blackbutt timber floors were sanded back and re-stained darker; spotted gum veneer joinery now features in the kitchen; as coastal-inspired blues and earthy green accents bring personality to the bathroom, bedroom, and kids’ bedroom.
‘The bathroom was one of the last things to be completed, and I struck gold with finding a beautiful slab of quartzite stone as an off-cut at a stonemason’s warehouse,’ she says of the colour-drenched space.
It’s taken lots of tinkering to get the space feeling just right. But, in its current form, the home feels perfectly personal, from the bedroom wall lights found in an antique shop in London, right down to the homewares from Studio Plinth: a furniture for hire service Rosie founded with stylist and interior designer Jessica Alice.
‘What makes me proud is that whenever new people visit the house, they’re always surprised by the sense of space that we’ve managed to create in a fairly humble ’70s villa, without expanding the footprint.’
