Today’s amazing residence, Mirror Image, showcases youthful interior designer Shona McElroy’s all-natural inclination toward contemporary style with an outdated-globe European edge. It is observed in her Venetian plaster walls, generous use of marble and herringbone flooring.
Acclaimed architect Madeleine Blanchfield, a decide for this year’s Australian Interior Layout Awards, for which Mirror Picture designed the shortlist in the residential group, described the house as “beautiful, considerate and creative.”
The owner, a home developer, states, “In my task I see a whole lot of amazing homes, but this is the initial time I have been glad with what I have. I occur dwelling and imagine, “There’s nowhere else I’d relatively live.”
Do not we all want we could say the exact same?!
The owners’ temporary was “European, New York-style lodge,” and they remaining Shona, of Smac Studio, to do her issue, owning labored with her in advance of, beloved her design and style and how straightforward she was to work with. The conclude final result is so refined and layered, it is challenging to believe that it is a new create.
The exquisite Elba marble curved staircase at the entrance sets the scene, with the flooring in this space a reliable slab of Verde Antigua marble. The entrepreneurs very considerably desired a outlined entry to the home, relatively than stepping straight into an open up program region.
It’s one particular of a lot of hanging characteristics in this exclusive four-mattress duplex in Sydney’s Dover Heights, which options a moody powder home beneath the stairs with a curved ceiling.
In the kitchen, four can sit comfortably going through just about every other at the cantilevered island bench in Esmeralda quartzite, and the family like that they never have to all sit in a line. Custom made timber cabinetry with glass doors allows the house owners to showcase artwork and shots, whilst complementing the herringbone floor.
Many structural alterations had to be produced to generate this eyesight. To accommodate the curved staircase the upstairs space was reconfigured and a void concerning the stair and skylight was included. House was also borrowed from the entrance and the powder place because of to the home’s restricted complete width of a lot less than 5 metres.
The kitchen area was flipped to the shared-wall facet of the duplex so a ground-to-ceiling, three-metre-large window could be put in for all-natural light and a yard facet.
A playful slender brass pendant light by Gervasoni over the dining desk ripples in the breeze and the reliable burnished brass rangehood and tv cabinet carry the glossy organic stone back again down to earth.
In the living home, the metallic tones proceed with a 3D artwork commissioned from Anna Pesce.
The entrance and open up approach kitchen area and dwelling areas downstairs were being separated with mirrored white shaker cabinetry that demonstrates gentle and functions as a mini butler’s pantry (suitable for mess administration offered the pair have three young young children and many appliances).
The powder area underneath the stairs ended up staying difficult but in the end, just one of Shona’s favourite elements of the structure. “We definitely didn’t want it to experience like it experienced been stuck beneath the staircase, but inevitably that’s where we experienced to set it. It’s like you are encapsulated in this major darkish inexperienced Venetian plaster cave.”
The entry was also a authentic triumph. “I consider that to build an entrance in a household that slender, to produce this kind of a formalised entrance, and independent public spaces from the non-public areas, and to have it very grand and just a feeling of entrance, I consider that was pretty outstanding,” she says. “A ton of the semis we’d labored on right before had a staircase that slice by the kitchen area or one more section of the home and was almost like an afterthought. I like the concept that this breaks up and divides the house. I come across it very lavish that you walk from your entertaining areas, that significant kitchen, living eating, exterior location by this marble forecourt.”
Shona, who graduated with an architecture diploma from UTS in 2017, started off her very own studio when she realised she was far more drawn to interiors. But she thinks her architecture coaching gives her a quite handy holistic solution. She was thrilled to be shortlisted in the Australian Interior Design Awards among people she has appeared up to for yrs.
Pictures: Anson Clever | Photograph styling: Claire Delmar | Design: Airth Developing | Architecture: Van Rooijen Meyers Architects | Landscape architecture: Dangar Basin Smith
