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A few months after interior designer Britt Ross took a break from hunting for the perfect Sydney home, a real estate newsletter listing this one-bedroom apartment appeared in her inbox. She had the keys within the week.
‘[It] sounds cliché, but when I walked in I knew that I loved it. It had the perfect amount of quirky features that it immediately stood out from the sea of beige I was used to viewing,’ she says.
The original blue bathroom and etched glass doors were the main selling points, along with its location down a quiet cul-de-sac — an enviable five-minute walk from the beach.
‘I showed the listing to a friend who said she could imagine me living there in a vintage kimono, listening to Fleetwood Mac,’ says Britt. ‘I think subconsciously this stayed in my mind when I was designing it.’
Over the next four years, Britt slowly transformed the apartment, leaning into the building’s ’60s aesthetic by retaining the original parquet timber floors and injecting colour, texture and patterns at every possible turn.
Soft pastel hues flow through the home, with the peach bedroom leading into a baby blue ensuite. Initially hesitant to wrap these colours from the walls to the popcorn ceiling, Britt soon loved the intimate atmosphere they bring to the room.
‘You’re pretty much colour-drenched as soon as you walk in, and it also creates a little blue pocket that you catch out of the corner of your eye when you’re in the bedroom,’ she says.
The original dolphin-shaped bath spout — a charming feature unique to all the one-bedroom apartments in Britt’s building (‘next door’s is a lion’) — is perfectly at home in this sea of blue.
But colour isn’t the only show-stopper in this apartment. Texture and pattern pop in every space, from the animal print armchair to the psychedelic kitchen bench seat, vintage floral pantry curtain and into the bedroom, where zig-zag carpet runs from the floor to the bedhead.
‘Creating a bespoke rug for the bedroom, then using matching carpet panels to create the headboard, was another way of bringing in an unexpected material… I am in love with the rug-to-headboard flame stitch moment; it was a long process of designing, sampling and waiting, so when it all came together it was very exciting,’ Britt explains.
‘It really gives the room a fun retro vibe — and we can vacuum the headboard to clean, which is such a win!’
This apartment’s charm doesn’t end with its character; it’s also functional — a nonnegotiable considering its 40 square-metre size.
‘[As someone with] A LOT of clothes, storage was a key priority,’ says Britt.
She reconfigured the kitchen to improve functionality, swapping the existing mini fridge for a full-sized integrated fridge-freezer and creating a custom banquette seat with in-built storage for shoes. Another bespoke piece, the pill-shaped dining table, makes the most of the limited footprint, while allowing easy circulation from one space to the next.
In the living room, Britt designed joinery to work hard without making the apartment feel cluttered.
‘I have a severe pet peeve of TVs taking centre stage in a room, but also have the conundrum of loving to watch them,’ says Britt.
She solved this problem by concealing the TV behind pocket doors in the joinery separating the kitchen from the bedroom.
‘Inside, it’s mounted on a bracket that allows us to extend and pivot the TV either way to watch from the banquette or the sofa,’ she explains.
After four years of slowly working away on her one-bedroom abode, Britt says it finally feels like a home.
‘I’m really happy with what we were able to achieve on a small budget,’ she says. ‘Working with the existing layout and being selective about where to spend money meant that relatively small changes could make a huge difference.’
