The St George region is home to a reasonable amount of character homes – unfortunately, not as many as it once was, given residents’ penchant for bulldozing them, which is what makes this Victorian sandstone a real gem. It’s been modernised but its best features remain intact – patterned tiles, ornate ceilings, elaborate fireplaces. Good stuff!

Unfortunately, I can’t find much heritage information about the home – but hopefully the pictures give you a sufficient idea of its charm. The living area has polished hard wood floors, stained glass windows looking out into the garden and looking through to the kitchen, a sandstone feature wall, a tiled fireplace and an ornate ceiling. The furniture is classic and complementary.

Original ceiling

The high ceilings are benefited by the design choices the owner has made, particularly the large mirror in the drawing room (which, incidentally, is my favourite room).

The home is currently on the market for offers over $1.15 million. For those wanting a character home with plenty of space, it provides good value for money 14km out of the CBD – just south of the inner-west.

Thomas the Tank Engine!

Jamie Durie's outdoor living area

This weekend marked Sydney’s Grand Designs Live, a home/landscape design exhibition that features products from some of Australia’s most noteworthy designers (think Dinosaur Design, top3 by design) and appearances by television hosts/contributors such as Peter Maddison and Andrew Winter. On Friday, I was given a run-through of the outdoor section by noted landscape architect Jamie Durie and interior designer Shaynna Blaze. There was also an awesome breakfast offering. So it was good times all ’round, really.

Blaze, Durie and the umbrella that features in Durie's Big W range

The pictures here are primarily from Durie’s outdoor setting, which he ran the other bloggers and me through. Unfortunately, I had to run off before Blaze took the other bloggers (and my amazing dad who stuck around to take photos, which will be posted in a separate post as there is so much content for this event that I wouldn’t want to overload anyone) around the displays, some of which were still being constructed.

As an aside, Blaze mentioned she knows of The House Hunter – very cool! – and also agreed with me that the seriously sexy Victorian home sold on Selling Houses Australia was a total bargain. I was drooling over that place for the money…

The first feature Durie focused on was the outdoor-kitchen-on-steroids, which is currently available to the Australian market. “It’s not just about cooking,” he said, emphasising the precedence social interaction has in his designs. “I designed this kitchen with Electrolux and we’ve sold our first few into Germany this year. It’s got the Electrolux integrated barbecue. The technology’s really sort of coming up – salt’s fine as it’s all marine-grade stainless steel. In fact, this is going into my house, which is on the ocean at the northern beaches …” That’s particularly impressive; when we were living on the beach, everything rusted – barbecue, guitar strings, the cover of Public Image Ltd’s Metal Box album…

I appreciated his focus on synthesising nature and outdoor elements with architecture and the built environment, which is something he addressed a number of times, noting that “The idea of growing plants out of furniture is something we’re doing a lot now so that we’re integrating architecture and the plant.”

Durie showing the quality of the fake turf

The artificial grass was more natural than your average variety (particularly in colour and sheen). While you can still tell it’s faux grass, it’s a far, far superior alternative to traditional forms of fake turf. “This artificial turf … has actually got a lot of dead blades in it as well. That’s how grass grows naturally. … It works like carpet, so it keeps the pile upright. … Years ago, artificial turf had a really tacky bad name -”

“- Well, there was a reason for that!” Blaze interrupted to exclaim, to everyone’s agreement.
“Technology’s advanced to a point now we’re using this on their soccer courts in Milan,” Durie concluded, pulling the pile over to demonstrate its natural form of movement.

Durie, a rose and a bucket of Coronas at half past 8 in the morning

The pièce de résistance of Durie’s work was the dome, which we sat in for some further detail. “The dome is basically our lounge room,” he explained.
“When you get lower to the earth, it kind of knocks the arrogance out of the room and you relax. … It becomes much more casual, and much more free-spirited.

“It’s about learning from all those social interactions inside the house and bringing them outdoors. We never take inspiration from outdoors, always from indoors.

“We believe in democratic design.”

“We’ve been able to pull all the personal domestic design … into commercial design.”

The space was complemented by plantlife. “We’re using an industrial product to create a very feminine, soft, evocative space. … The trick to this is not to build it on site, but to pre-fab the beams.” To me, it felt like a space that suited both genders – but evocative, definitely.

Much to the excitement of any engineers out there, I’m sure, Durie mentioned that “Nothing we do these days isn’t on CAD.”

Also, prepare yourself for disappointment if you were planning for him to make-over your yard. “One hundred per cent of our work is commercial, we don’t do any domestic gardens any more … We got to a point where we simply couldn’t do everyone’s garden.”

He also pointed out that he has a long-running outdoor range that sells in Big W. “We believe in democratic design.”

When I asked about the price point, I was told that ”The price point you will not beat anywhere in the country. .. We started this nine years ago and our price points have not changed.” This may actually give me a reason to walk into Big W. Miracles happen!

Macadamia shells

There will be another post documenting some of the other displays at Grand Designs with plenty more images, so watch out for part two!

The breakfast. Brioche? Total win!

I have some eye-candy for you – and it’s heritage eye-candy, which is usually preferable. This development at Camperdown has just about reached completion, and hopefully it’ll add to the cool-trendy-warehouse-conversion vibe that Camperdown has been cultivating over the past few years. This particular development is, as the name suggests, a re-working of an old sugar warehouse.

The original site.

Camperdown is a well-positioned area – very close to the city, Sydney Uni, UTS and Annandale, which is one of my favourite suburbs and as such deserves a mention. It still has a bit of a creepy vibe (in my opinion), but young professional hispters seem to enjoy a bit of ‘grittiness’ (but not too much!). It’s a suburb that’s ideal for developers due to its industrial heritage – there are plenty of character-filled warehouses to redesign.

It’s a good combination for the burgeoning population – which tends to be a combination of students and fairly well-off young professionals who want to be close to the action.

I particularly like the outdoor spaces here – you’ll find that I’m a sucker for indoor/outdoor spaces, and these seem particularly seamless (a bedroom with pretty sliding door access to a courtyard is my idea of heaven).

Another thing I’m crazy about – which you might know if you’re a regular reader – is floorboards. Most apartment complexes opt for carpets for noise reasons, so it’s nice to see this development breaking the mould (presumably with soundproof insulation). Floorboards add timeless appeal to a space, so they’re always an appealing design choice.

 
Alexandria. So many things to say! I used to live in this suburb, so I hunted down a home there to feature on the blog. My intention was to find a Victorian terrace or worker’s cottage to explore, since these characterise pockets of the suburb (as do apartment blocks, old and, mostly, new). This home, which is on one of Alexandria’s best streets, is a very worthy modern version of one. In fact, I was tricked by it and thought it was one until I was up close to the frontage, and I rarely make that mistake! I don’t normally like contemporary interpretations of heritage designs, but this home is impressive, particularly as it complements the streetscape – a vital quality, in my mind.

The houses in Alexandria (excluding the apartments) are generally worker’s cottages – mostly small, with few of the exquisitely large terraces in wealthier suburbs like Paddington. Its history is intriguing as it was extremely industrial, and much of the area’s southern end remains that way (although it’s had Bourke Street Bakery for years, and more recently Sonoma) – it therefore didn’t necessarily have the same ‘sordid’ past as surrounding neighbourhoods going through similar processes of gentrification such as Waterloo and Redfern. It was strictly a working class suburb, though, and for awhile it stagnated while its northern neighbours began to be lavished with attention. That’s changed, though – the suburb is now strictly trendy, although you’ll find it’s cheaper to buy into its southern end. On that note, it’s a pretty substantial suburb – its northern edge is four kilometres from the city and its southern end snakes down to Mascot, around seven kilometres away from the CBD.

This home ticks a hefty box by offering four bedrooms, three bathrooms and two carspaces – this is something that most of the older homes in Alexandria won’t offer, so you can see the different ways in which old and new have appeal! These days, we’re slightly more conscious of light than the Victorians (thank god, because I need natural light in indoor spaces), and the home is also built in an efficient way, offering space and storage by using areas that are normally wasted.

The main bedroom.

The home is currently on the market, as is its neighbour, for $1,350,000. If you are keen (or if you are house hunting at the moment, clearly a favourite hobby of mine), you’re probably thinking about home loans (or you have an impressive amount of wealth, and I am seriously jealous) – so mortgage comparison tools can be helpful (I’m a big fan of sizing up the competition, whether deciding on flights or fake tan brands for my crazily pale complexion). These cute terraces are definitely a good step for the suburb – I’m happy to see that its heritage is finally being respected and celebrated, as I was a little scared that it would become completely dominated by unremarkable modern apartment blocks…

My favourite room!

This Georgian house at Ryde is very imposing on Victoria Road, so I stopped by to have a look. A knock at the door produced no results, but at least we can appreciate its magnificent exterior. It was built around 1841 by a local magistrate, according to the City of Ryde, which now owns the property. The council describes the home as being in fair condition, with most of its features intact.

Ryde District Historical Society and the City of Ryde Art Society now use the site. Unsurprisingly, it was once on a much larger plot, which has been progressively subdivided over the past two centuries. Like many historical houses, it’s had an at times turbulent history – for a period it was used as the grounds of a service station! … Because that’s appropriate. Luckily, Sydney now acknowledges the significance of heritage buildings; there was a period in the mid-to-late twentieth century in which no one seemed to care either way.

It’s a true beauty – the popping red is instantly recognisable from the busy main road and the rear of the house, with two adjacent wings, shows off its size and character. It’s located in Ryde, a middle class suburb in Sydney’s northern suburbs (wedged between the north shore and the north west) that boasts many of the city’s best historical homes due to its background as one of the area’s earliest commercial hubs.

View of the Parramatta River