Inside A Waterfront Home Designed to Be Hidden (House Tour)
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The view from this property is pretty incredible. You sit back and watch the boats pass by and the
glistening water and you're surrounded by extremely beautiful lush trees. The fig trees in particular
that line the street are so majestic and sculptural in their form and every time you look through any
of the windows you are surrounded by nature in this leafy suburb. I'm Steph from Studio
Johnston and I was the project director on Balmain East House.
Today we are on Wangal Land in Balmain East, a harbour-side suburb known for its rich history
and its quaint village feel.
So when we originally were engaged by the homeowners, their brief was to introduce
warmth and softness into the house and a space that would allow them to be flexible in terms
of growing as a family but also a space that would allow them to entertain. The entry to the house is
on the ground floor. Straight in front of you, you see the stairs that lead up to level one and
behind that is a small entry nook and a mudroom. This space spills out onto the outdoor terrace
where there's a pool, a curved inbuilt seat, a pizza oven and then steps down to the front
lawn and the water. From the outdoor terrace you can connect back upstairs via the yellow spiral
staircase. As you come up to level one on your right hand side there's a dining area, a living
room, powder room and a study and to your left hand side enjoying the beautiful waterfront view
is the kitchen, the more intimate banquet seat for family dinners, a bar area and the main bedroom
and bathroom. The kitchen was very central to the design. A lot began in the kitchen for us in the
design process. We wanted it to serve as both a functional and social hub. The client loves
cooking and so the kitchen had to work hard in order to accommodate all the things that she needed.
We knew we needed a product that would be really robust for her kitchen. The zip hydro tap with a
pullout is extremely useful for someone who likes to cook and entertain often and allows you to
clean the sink very easily and quickly. It's quite a bold beautiful statement that draws your eye.
It's extremely convenient to use and just makes the functionality of the kitchen so much easier
and being able to have chilled boiling sparkling on demand when you're hosting is very convenient
for her. The house that was here before was a typical house of its era the early 2000s that
had a lot of white, a lot of steel, very sharp angles and had quite a clinical sterile feel to
it. So we wanted to really introduce color into the house and the trees that surrounded the house
have this beautiful olive undertone which is a color that the client really resonated with.
And both the olive and the mustards weave in and out of each other in the house in subtle ways
on a large scale and on a small scale. So one of them is quite a calming tranquil color,
the greens, and then you've got this more optimistic dynamic color to juxtapose that
with the yellows. The thing we're most proud of is seeing the client and her family really happy
in the space and that the space is being used exactly as we envisioned it. My favorite part is
how the color story has come together and the cohesion of the materials but also how the view
has been enhanced by implementing that floor-to-ceiling glazing and that connection
back to the water and its beautiful natural surroundings.