Tag: open plan living

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House Tours

Breathtaking new Hamptons style home in Melbourne’s south east


Beautiful aesthetics combine with functional design in this Hamptons-inspired new build for a young family of four in Melbourne.

A charming vegetable garden sits behind the picket fence, leading to the front of the residence. Contemporary design meets country style living with the barn style garage door and vintage style wall sconces.

From the light and bright façade of the exterior panelling and contrasting matte black windows, the home invites you to a generous entrance via the French doors. The entryway features a mud room with a tiled accent wall.

The two-storey home maximises space with an open plan kitchen, dining and living area. The space is both stunning and practical, with a carefully executed flow between common spaces and the five bedrooms.

The bathrooms are all pretty gorgeous too!

Expansive bi-fold doors bring the outside in, revealing an outdoor kitchen and a stunning pool area at the rear of the house.

It was designed and built by Construct Melbourne, family-owned and operated residential builders. They specialise in luxury custom homes, and also offer major renovation or extensions and residential design services.

For more on Construct Melbourne

Photography: Simon Shiff | Styling: Norsu Home

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Expert Tips RENO ADDICT

Open plan living: How to make it work

By Cherie Barber

Few can resist the airy feeling of open plan, with the free-flowing sense of space and light, airy interiors. However, without a good sense of how to furnish and light a large, open plan area, it can feel cavernous and cold; about as homely as a storage warehouse.

The key is correct ‘zoning’, using elements like lighting, artworks, rugs, colour and furniture to create invisible rooms within the open plan, along with unifying elements that merge all the spaces seamlessly together.


Let’s come together
First up, you want a sense of cohesion as your foundation. When the whole space is empty it should feel like one big room. You achieve this with devices like flooring all at the same level (particularly if it flows inside/out), the same type or at least the same coloured flooring and the same colour palette throughout. Now you have a blank slate to work with.

Go with the flow
Next you need to create a flow that makes sense. To a large extent, the placement of windows and doors will dictate this. In typical open plan, you have a combination of kitchen, dining and living. It makes practical sense that the kitchen flows into the dining space. Depending on whether the space is L-shaped, square or rectangular, the lounging area may be an extension of these two ‘rooms’ or adjoin them. If you’re lucky, the interior will spill to an outdoor entertaining area.

Get in the zone
Now you create warmth and character and give definition to the open plan through zoning. You’ve decided where your designated rooms are, but it’s time to communicate this to the world.

Start with the kitchen. As the cabinetry and splashback are already in place by now, lighting is the most powerful tool at your disposal. Pendant lights over an island bench or breakfast bar, with obligatory dimmers, create a casual eating/work zone. High beam for chopping and low beam for relaxing with a wine after dinner.

Pride of place
For the dining area, a large table and chairs is an obvious statement piece, but think about how you can make this ‘room’ cosier. A rug that comfortably fits the chairs when pulled out (a 75cm overlap from the edge of the table will generally suffice) provides an obvious border. And again, a feature light over the centre of the table creates ambience and interest. Consider a mirror, artwork or even a console on the wall adjoining the dining table. It will help to anchor the space. And remember, a long piece of furniture, with floating legs, against the longest wall will accentuate the length of a room.

Easy living
The lounging area is really where you want to think about intimacy and warmth, and catering for a variety of moods. It’s a place to read, relax, watch TV and chat with family and friends. Along with the kitchen, it’s the social focus of the home. A mix of lighting such as floor lamps, table lamps and overhead lighting is ideal.

A nice big rug will define the space, and furnishings like a sofa and chairs create the boundary (a modular sofa that forms a right angle does a great job of this). A wall-hanging TV opposite the sofa is probably inevitable, but just try not to make it the focus of the whole room.

–Cherie Barber is the director of Renovating for Profit, a company that teaches everyday people how to buy and renovate properties for a profit.

For more on Cherie Barber and James Treble’s Interior Design for Profit online course

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Design Kitchens RENO ADDICT

What to consider if you’re thinking about making your kitchen open plan

We are seeing an increase in open plan kitchen designs as people want larger, brighter living spaces. The kitchen is the heart of the home so it is only natural that it be open to the dining and living area; it is not only where we prepare and cook food for our families, but it’s also where we help the kids with their homework and entertain friends.

Designed by Gerrad Hall
Designed by Gerrad Hall

First of all think about how you want your kitchen to function, and then how that should interact with your dining and living area. Ideally, your kitchen should be unique, however some standard kitchens have standard constraints. There are a few typical kitchen layouts that may help guide you in finding the best open plan kitchen for your space and your life.

For an island layout, you need quite a large area to comfortably include an island but this arrangement can provide a lot of amenity with space for cooking as well as entertaining – giving you the opportunity for a cooking area that looks straight out on to your living and dining area.

NEESON MURCUTT KITCHEN
Designed by Neeson Murcutt

Alternatively, a peninsula layout can often give you many of the advantages of an island, but uses less space given you needn’t have access from both sides. Ideal for smaller kitchens or a rectangular area, a peninsula kitchen can result in more bench space.

Unless you have a long wall, a straight-line kitchen can squeeze bench space but its advantage is that it can be designed, almost like cabinetry, to be unobtrusive so it can be part of the living and dining area.

Variations of each other, the L and U-shaped kitchens are both flexible and efficient, and ideal if you want or need to incorporate a dining table into the room.

Mike Jensen kitchen
Designed by Mike Jensen

Given your kitchen will be on display, aesthetics also play an important role in designing your kitchen. So it is a good idea to choose appliances that offer flexibility when it comes to selecting a finish that fits with the design and look of your kitchen.

Kitchen designers prefer appliances to speak the same language: appliances with consistency in their looks and edges that run seamlessly between different products so the eye isn’t jarred by out-of-line elements. Appliances with the same handles or glass features lend intention to the design, helping pull it all together.  So choosing appliances from the same design family makes this easy.

Designed by Natalie Du Bois
Designed by Natalie Du Bois

Use tools online to help you visualise your perfect open plan kitchen, such as Fisher & Paykel’s The Kitchen Tools, a source of visual inspiration, helpful drawings, product specifications and case studies. Originally designed for architects and designers, the tools and content are professional and detailed.

— Mark is the general manager of Design & Integration, Fisher & Paykel. 

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Interiors Addict

If you want a stylish kitchen, how your appliances look can be as important as how they function

Sponsored by Fisher & Paykel

I’m currently helping my aunt with some design ideas for her new kitchen and while cabinetry, benchtops, flooring and tiles are some of the more obvious elements to choose, there’s no denying appliances are a really important part of the mix. You don’t want your shiny new kitchen let down by ageing appliances or new ones that stick out like a sore thumb or don’t match. The good news is, you don’t have to completely hide and integrate everything behind doors to ensure the finished look is cohesive. Brands like Fisher & Paykel are going beyond simply manufacturing appliances, and taking a more holistic approach to product design that also considers the aesthetics and ‘matchability’ of individual appliances as important pieces that fit together to create the kitchen look.

Years of experience working with architects and kitchen designers have given Fisher & Paykel valuable insight into kitchen design and the importance of offering functionality without sacrificing style. Their ‘Designed to Match’ philosophy underpins the way they design their products and translates into a coordinated look across its entire family of kitchen appliances. Rather than a conflicting mix of styles, the brand boasts one of the only ranges of appliances that are truly designed to match. And when I say match, I mean down to the smallest detail; everything from handles, dials, materials and proportions – across the range of refrigerators, dishwashers, ovens, rangehoods and cooktops.

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Sleek, contemporary and minimalist styling means they’re unlikely to date, which is important when you consider how much a new kitchen (often the most expensive room in the house) can cost. It’s even more important when you consider how many kitchens are now open plan and extending into the living space.

And you don’t have to follow the traditional advice that your fridge, oven and sink absolutely must be laid out in a triangle (frankly, this has always seemed a little too rigid to me as everyone uses their kitchen differently, right?). In fact, Fisher & Paykel have pioneered a movement away from the traditional work triangle, allowing homeowners to design their kitchen to suit the way they live their life and how they use their appliances. Their unique DishDrawerTM (literally a dishwasher in a drawer), means you can place a dishwasher close to your entertainment area for glasses and one near the sink for pots, pans and plates. The options are endless.

Fisher & Paykel are renowned for their appliance, having been awarded prestigious international Red Dot Awards for three of their latest offerings – induction Touch and Slide cooktops, three-burner Gas-on-Glass cooktop and 60cm Built-In Oven – in the last 12 months alone.

If you’re considering a new kitchen, Fisher and Paykel’s national Designed to Match Kitchen Promotion is running until 12 October 2014 and rewards you based on your total spend on eligible kitchen appliances. Customers who purchase eligible Fisher & Paykel refrigerators, freezers, dishwashers, ovens, freestanding cookers, rangehoods and/or cooktops in a single transaction to the value of $3,000 or more, receive a bonus Essteele five-piece cookware set worth RRP $800. Customers who spend $5,000 or more on eligible products will be rewarded with the Essteele cookware set as well as an RRP $230 voucher from Organic Meat Online.

For more information.

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Interviews Kitchens RENO ADDICT

At home with My Kitchen Rules’ celebrity chef, Pete Evans

As soon as I found out we were going to get the chance to take a peek inside Pete Evans’ newly renovated Sydney home, I immediately wanted to check out his kitchen. As the owner of multiple restaurants and a judge on the hit TV show My Kitchen Rules, I had high hopes, and not surprisingly, I wasn’t disappointed!

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“Our kitchen was always going to be the soul of our home, especially because home cooked, nourishing, mindful, paleo-inspired food is such a focus in both our business and our personal life,” explains Pete. “It’s the part of our home where we all enjoy so much memorable time together, which for us is an integral part of connecting with ourselves, each other and our food.”

Featuring an almost six-metre Corian island bench, it also doubles as their dining room table, a purposeful decision, to generate a feeling of closeness between the family and flow throughout the house. “There’s no separation between kitchen and dining and we also chose to have our kitchen and family room laid out in an open plan manner,” says Pete. “This allows us to always feel close to and communicate with the kids, which generates a nice sense of togetherness.”

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The house is home to Pete, his fiancée Nicola Watson and his children Chilli and Indii. It has gone under quite a thorough renovation, including putting in a brand new kitchen, laundry and outdoor space. And while Pete says the original house had some great bones, he always knew he was going to have to renovate the kitchen.

“It was something that we needed to do regardless of which house we bought because we both definitely had an ideal kitchen in mind that suited our specific needs and our family,” says Pete. “In the beginning, the living area and kitchen were both quite dark and disjointed, whereas now it feels a lot more open, unified and filled with light. Everything flows from the kitchen to the family room to the outdoors and it has a pleasing brightness that greets you as soon as you walk in the front door.”

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With a style that is not ultra modern but rather ultra functional, the home is full of clean lines, bright yet neutral tones and refreshing splashes of colour, a design aesthetic Pete always had in mind. “Both Nic and I were very hands on in the design because we knew exactly what we needed, from the colour, to the appliances, to the cupboards and drawers, and we were conscious of exactly what sort of space we required for everything to function harmoniously.”

With Nic being a talented artist and as an avid skull collector (her latest being a saber-toothed cat skull!) the home has no shortage of unique homewares and furniture, yet Pete’s favourite piece has to be his BoConcept couch: “It’s the ultimate place to snuggle up and watch a movie, which is something we all really like to do, especially in winter.”

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While Pete undoubtably loves his home, especially that kitchen, it’s not actually a room that is Pete’s favourite part of the house. “I have to say the thing I love the most about our house isn’t anything that you can touch or see, it’s the sense of contentment and comfort that we all feel when we’re at home. That’s what wholeheartedly stands out to me and it’s a feeling that I don’t take for granted.”

Can’t argue with that, eh?

Do you like Pete’s home? Before you ask, much of the furniture shown is available from BoConcept and one of their interior designers helped him achieve the look.

Photography by Jacqui Turk.

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Interiors Addict

Designing in the tropics: the divine Darwin

By Verity Coonan

When people think of Darwin it’s often red dirt and crocs and some backwards living – some people (admit it) might not have even heard of the place. However in recent years Darwin is coming into its own, with a bustling city, waterfront precinct and youth bursting with fresh ideas and eyes for new opportunities. Darwin is no longer the ‘city up north’ but one to show itself on the map as a landmark city with a style of its own.

The design culture in Darwin is as diverse as its people. Our conditions are harsh (they don’t call it going troppo for nothing) and because of recent events the budget strings pull especially tight. But seeing these elements as a benefit, even an inspiration, is what drives the eclectic style I like to call ‘Darwinian’.

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