Labour Of Love
Revived and reimagined by a talented multitasker, this Sydney home has been transformed from an ugly duckling into a designer swan.
Talented owner-designer-renovators nurture their ugly duckling into an elegant swan.
With their home now renovated and impeccably furnished, Sydney creative couple Dean and Olga Zdjelar can look back and laugh about the day they bought the place. But it was no laughing matter at the time. “I cried!” says Olga. “And they were not happy tears.” The year was 2016 and Dean and Olga had been repeatedly out-bid at auctions for other properties. With a young baby, Henry, in tow, they were desperate to find a home within their budget. When Olga first saw this house, she was underwhelmed. It was a two-bedroom, 1940s semi that had been renovated in the 1980s and stripped of any period details and character. “It was the ugliest house I’d ever seen,” says Olga. Clearly, others shared her feelings. “On the day of the auction, it was pouring with rain and no one else
turned up to bid,” says Dean, an interior designer and professional renovator who convinced Olga the home could be transformed. “It was on a 382-square-metre block — a big block for a semi. I knew I could turn the ugly duckling into a swan.” Despite her “what have we done?” tears, Olga had faith in her husband’s vision and capabilities. “I knew he would do amazing things with it,” she says.
As Dean tells it, the evolution of this little duckling has been very much a combined effort. Indeed, both he and Olga have serious design credentials to bring to the table: after meeting at university, where they studied interior design, Dean spent a decade designing high-spec interiors while Olga worked in fashion. Dean’s specialties are spatial planning and minimalism; Olga’s are colour and vintage-Scandi styling. Between them, there was a lot of creative talent to draw on.
Their aim was to turn the dwelling into a five-bedroom home with plenty of room to grow for themselves and Henry, now five. Dean drew up plans for a single-storey extension, atop a design that retained the two original front rooms but reworked everything else. Downstairs, there are now two bedrooms at the front, with an open-plan kitchen/dining/living area at the rear. Upstairs, there are three bedrooms, including the main bedroom with walk-in wardrobe and ensuite. To make the most of the 57-metre-long block, Dean also designed a studio and double garage at the back of the property.
During the demolition phase, the old home imparted a lovely gift to the couple. “The common wall was covered in plaster and wallpaper, and Olga said we should see what was underneath,” says Dean. “We stripped back the layers and struck gold. It’s a beautiful wall built from recycled bricks and is one of the greatest features of the house.”
Dean was hands-on during the build and crafted many of the bespoke touches himself, including the beautiful oak ‘ribs’ of the balustrade on the staircase. He also formed the 14-metre concrete bench that stretches along the downstairs living-room wall. Design-wise, he added elements of drama, such as the rounded black bulkhead above the kitchen, which helps to define the cooking and dining zones while creating a perfect foil for the benchtops of honed Arabescato marble. He also designed walls of joinery featuring hidden doors
“IT WAS AN OLD, DARK SEMI. ONE OF OUR CHALLENGES WAS TO BRING LIGHT INTO THE HOME, AND DEAN HAS DONE THAT WITH BRILLIANT RESULTS .”
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“I PUSHED THE BOUNDARIES WITH THE CEILING HEIGHTS UPSTAIRS AND IT CHANGED THE DYNAMICS OF THE ROOMS. I ENJOY SEEING VISITORS’ REACTIONS TO THE SPACE AND LIGHT .” Dean Zdjelar
(leading to rooms and/or storage cupboards), creating a sense of the unexpected. Upstairs, he took the ceilings to their absolute maximum reach – 5 metres – and lined them with V-groove panelling to accentuate the height. Skylights placed above the stairwell help to flood the entire home with natural light.
There are no glossy or polished surfaces in this house – everything is deliberately matt and velvety, providing the perfect backdrop for the couple’s collection of Mid-Century furnishings and art. One of the most striking of these is a portrait of the late US chef Anthony Bourdain (bought by Olga several years ago as a gift for Dean), which takes pride of place in the living room. An equally joy-giving object is the vintage Louis Poulsen pendant light above the dining table. “It came out of the Sydney Opera House when they were renovating the Bennelong restaurant,” says Olga of the prized possession. Fittingly, Dean has created a theatrical ‘stage’ for it, hanging the pendant from a cut-out in the black bulkhead above.
In many ways the pendant light is symbolic of the couple’s teamwork in shaping the home. “This house is a perfect collage of my minimalistic style and Olga’s love of Scandinavian pieces,” Dean says. # Dean operates two businesses, The Studio Zdjelar (design/styling) and The Designer-Renovator (renovating services), Sydney, NSW; 0401 954 646.