A Designer's Own Home Where Colour Transforms Every Room (House Tour)

This house really has been a wonderful testing ground for colour. We've brought a number of our clients to the home and have just shown them that to live with colour can actually be really calming and a really beautiful warm space to be in. I'm Marty Doherty, Director of Studio Doherty and this is our house, Gable House. The home is situated about four kilometres southeast of the Melbourne CBD. It's quite a vibrant suburb in Melbourne and this house is located in a beautiful leafy street that has a pub at the end, beautiful gardens, tennis courts and a big local pool at the other end. The house is called Gable House because of the varied roof forms that occupy the house. The house is on a corner site and it also has a large tower at the front so the name Gable House seemed quite apt. The initial brief centred around reconfiguring the main rooms in the house and also adding on a contemporary renovation to the back of the house. We are a family of four with two teenage daughters and it was about designing a house that would grow with our family. We were also really keen to introduce lots of light to this home. Victorian and Federation homes are notoriously dark and for us it was a great challenge to try and make this house light-filled. It was a challenging project in that we were the interior design firm and my husband's business Exceed Group was also the builders. So it was really important to us that we worked with an architect that could work with both of us and also have a great collaborative spirit. We worked with folk architects because they have a really sympathetic nature towards restoration of existing buildings. Tim's personality really suited ours as well. He was incredibly passionate about design but also had an agile approach to the design process. As you enter the home there is quite a generous foyer which forms part of the tower. The front of the home comprises of three really generous rooms. Our study in the front of the house then our bedroom and then the living room. We have removed one other bedroom and converted that into a powder room and also our ensuite as You walk down a hallway and then come into a quite a large space and that has our kitchen, dining, fireplace area and this little nook. And then you walk down the side of the home through a glass hallway which then leads to the new extension of the home which has two kids bedrooms, bathroom, laundry and a garage space. Upstairs in Chile's bedroom there is also a gorgeous little roof garden which overlooks the courtyard and both buildings. Having a great connection to our garden has also been really important for this house. The front garden is a lot more generous than our rear courtyard and it's been lovely connecting with our neighbours, connecting with people walking their dogs up and down the street and actually sitting in the garden using the fire pit, having friends over for gin and tonics. It's a lovely way to connect with the neighbourhood. The colour palette that we used for this project was informed mostly by the coloured glass in the windows. It's also been a really nice base for us to then choose all of the rest of the finishes and materials. Externally the new extension is clad in these diamond shaped zinc shingles which are incredibly robust, low maintenance and also have this beautiful reflective quality as well. Internally in the old section of the house we've maintained and restored many of the original features of the home including the fretwork, the fireplaces, beautiful cornices, skirtings and architraves. The idea of really embracing the English nature of this home as well was something so important. I love the idea of utilising ceilings, I feel like they're one of the most underutilised surfaces in a home and we've got 3.6 metre high ceilings and so the idea of looking up when you walk into a space was something that was very appealing to us. We searched long and hard for a wallpaper that felt like it belonged in this home but also had a whimsical, playful feel to it and we finally landed on this amazing hollyhock wallpaper which is like this garden up on the ceiling so we often find ourselves lying on the floor gazing up at the ceiling. I feel like the interiors is a real tapestry and a real time warp of Studio Doherty's progression and we've incorporated elements from some of our favourite projects and have just twisted them and warped them a little bit and made them suit the way that we live. Bonnie our youngest daughter really challenged some of our decisions especially around colour and materials and she thought the house was just going to be this rainbow house and it would just be horrible to live in and when Bonnie walked into the house for the first time she walked in and burst out laughing saying mum this is the most beautiful house I've ever seen. So the moral of the story is don't listen to your kids, be confident in your ideas and just go for it.