2021 Australian Interior Design Awards: Residential Decoration – joint award

Jury comment

Garden House is well curated, breathtakingly beautiful and very liveable. It is a thoughtfully executed interior decoration scheme that is particular to the client and place. But, above all, the jury was impressed by its polished eclecticism. This project is global in the best sense of the word, displaying a thorough knowledge of the history of decoration while remaining utterly contemporary. It is to be admired for its austerity, freshness and restraint.

Design statement

Joking that they’d happily live in a luxury tent, such is their passion for their 2,400- square-metre garden, the clients of Garden House embraced a more metaphorical approach, renovating and decorating their “forever home.”

When the landscape is the mesmerizing star of the show, restraint in the decoration was the key to success. The unusually long garden was everything to the clients, and they wanted to feel as if they were living in it. Extending the home included the creation of a new kitchen, master suite, and living and dining dubbed the Garden Room – a space more suited to a Luca Guadagnino film than the battleaxe blocks of Sydney’s North Shore.

The scale of the dwelling moves from the original domestic scale, opening up to the grand scale of the garden. The addition’s floor area is not large; however, the rooms take on an exaggerated size, with soaring ceilings and super-wide walls.

The new spaces are bold and confident in their identity. Enormous openings draw the garden into the house. This change of scale between old and new creates the illusion that you could almost touch the end of the garden 100 metres away.

Design practice —Arent and Pyke

Project team — Juliette Arent, Sarah-Jane Pyke, Genevieve Hromas

The Award for Residential Decoration supported by Sub-Zero Wolf. The Australian Interior Design Awards are presented by the Design Institute of Australia and Artichoke magazine. For more images of this project, see the Australian Interior Design Awards gallery.