Cheat sheet
Who lives here Kelly, who works in the legal profession; her husband Daniel, who’s in construction; their sons: Malachi, four, and Levi, two; and Staffordshire bull terriers Brooklyn and Zahra.
Style of home A 1910 ‘Cal bung’ in Sydney’s inner west that’s been enlarged to include a new first floor, and refurbished throughout so it now has the polish of a luxury hotel.
The family bought the property in 2015. The renovation took 16 months, which included a change of builder. It was completed in 2019.
Five Dock, in the stroller-and-gelato belt of Sydney’s inner west, might just be the spiritual home of the California bungalow, which, with its flexible floor plan and indoor-outdoor flow, has helped define modern Australian living. It was into a prime 90-year-old example of a ‘Cal bung’ that Kelly, a paralegal assistant, and her husband Daniel, who owns a building company, moved in 2015 with plans to start a family. The home had a yard suitable for kids and dogs and a parking spot for their SUV, but the presence of Daniel’s ever-hospitable parents 600 metres away
– a pot always bubbling on the stove, the kettle permanently warm – was the clincher. “Having that support network close by was definitely on our radar,” says Kelly.
Describing herself as “barefoot and beachy”, Kelly moved often as a child, “from country to city to country to coast”, and had lived in 20 houses and apartments by the time she married Daniel. She was tired of packing and unpacking, and of souvenirs from past lives filling her shelves. “When you move around so often, you’re never fully set up,” she explains. “There’s always one foot out the door, and [interior] style becomes the clutter that accumulates. One thing it taught me is that you really don’t need a lot.”
For both Kelly and Daniel, the Five Dock house represented a clean slate on which to create a “stress-free sanctuary” after hectic workdays. Their family quickly grew to include two children and two Staffies, and they realised they needed to optimise every inch of the place to live comfortably. Daniel, who moved just once growing up, was used to space, so the relatively tight 280-square-metre block was a challenge: how to jam two more bedrooms, an ensuite, an office and an indoor laundry into the floor plan, plus add the desired deck, plunge pool and subterranean wine cellar to the backyard?
The obvious solution was to build upwards, but Daniel was determined this gut-job wouldn’t crush the soul of the architecture. They appointed Brad Inwood Architects and
Louise Spicer of Onefour Interiors, the latter initially to help them refine their ideas and then to mastermind the reconfigured interior, which they wanted to feel “like a luxury hotel”.
Parenthood is, as they say, a series of compromises, and what they were able to do with the house followed a similar path. Sadly, the pool was nixed and the wine cellar morphed into a (still schmick) wine cabinet. The planned office on the first floor became a linen cupboard, while custom drawers in the staircase now stores work documents as the couple hot-desk around the house on laptops. Another of Louise’s innovations was a butler’s pantry, tucked behind Tasmanian-oak slats, which has justified its cost by helping to keep the kitchen benches clear and allowing Kelly to create and experiment with abandon at the stove.
Daniel, whom Kelly describes as “a city boy – the New York to my Byron Bay” and Louise has dubbed a “frustrated designer”, has an instinct for wow-factor and lots of ideas. “He would bring me things and ask which ones I liked. That was good for me, but not so good for him, as I wasn’t choosing materials and fittings with price in mind,” recalls Kelly, laughing. “What can I say? I have expensive tastes!” In short, the house “turned out more opulent than we planned”, she admits.
The only big spanner in the works was the decision to switch builders part-way through the project, which everyone agrees was very stressful. “It got to the point of, Are we ever going to get back into our house?” says Kelly. Enter, stage left, the couple’s friend, high-end builder Luigi Ginardi, armour shining in the Five Dock sunshine, and the ‘airplane bungalow’ at last took flight. “Family life is definitely lived easily in the space now,” concludes Louise of the stunning result.
And the grandparents? “They think we’ve done a beautiful job,” says Kelly. But despite ample seating both indoors and out at the new house, dinner is still usually at their place. “Daniel’s mum is Italian and his dad’s Portuguese, and you knock on the door and they say, ‘Come in, let us feed you,’” says Kelly fondly.
The couple originally saw the house as an investment they’d outgrow in three to five years, so it’s testament to the liveability of the redesign that all bets are now off as to how long this will be home, even with a third child on the way. After all, reasons Kelly, “More space than this would mean more to clean.”