It took three and a half years for Freya Salter and her husband Richard Odie to fastidiously renovate their Woollahra residence.
‘We began in August 2020, and given the scarcity of labour throughout that point, Richard constructed a lot of the home on his personal,’ provides Freya, who additionally dealt with the home’s redesign.
Along with reconfiguring rooms to enhance the house’s privateness, insulation, and air flow, the works prolonged the home in direction of the road and added a brand new third storey on the entrance.
‘The kitchen, eating and front room had been multi functional area, nearly half the scale it’s now,’ Freya says.
The prevailing structure of the home featured two separate fibro and brick dwellings designed round a central courtyard, filling the home with pure gentle and a way of area that the household beloved. However as a designer together with her personal eponymous follow, Freya wished to place a private contact on the interiors, creating a brand new palette that referenced pure supplies she recalled from her time working in southern Italy.
‘I really like how the simplicity of painted brick, the limestone and the wooden mixed to create a layered, tranquil surroundings,’ she says.
They retained the facet partitions and the courtyard, enhancing this characteristic with a brand new double-height void that overlooks the backyard. One of many largest ‘hurdles’ of the renovations was merely getting the home windows and glass doorways into the property — ‘it required cranes and manpower to manoeuvre the big panels of glass into place’ — however the finish result’s a part of what makes the house so serene.
The big home windows convey the outside in nearly each room, as the primary bed room upstairs now captures views out in direction of Cooper Park and Double Bay.
Sage inexperienced accents and chalky whites are paired alongside heat timbers within the kitchen, flowing into comparable hues all through the remainder of the home — except for the rust-coloured silken wallpaper within the couple’s bed room. It’s a barely moodier area, the place deep-coloured carpets and thick luxurious curtains make the room really feel like a non-public retreat.
‘I really like our bed room,’ Freya provides. ‘The outlook is gorgeous. We see over the timber within the day, and the glowing metropolis lights at evening.’
