PAST PERFECT
Repurposed pieces from a century’s high-design periods create an ebullient clash of pattern and period in this stately Melbourne bungalow hybrid.
In the words of the late, great Ada Louise Huxtable, long-time architecture critic for The New York Times, “If you wait long enough, what is admired will be relegated to history’s dustbin, and if you wait even longer, it will be rescued and restored.” It’s a truism that keeps the auction houses full and the furnishing industry ticking away, but in this moment of ever-changing value and environment, can we in all conscience keep feeding our voracious appetite for the new? Designers Belinda Hall and Fiona Richardson of Richard Hall & Son aren’t your typical environmental activists; indeed they’d laugh at the tag. But in their own quiet way they are radicalising the ideals of rampant Modernism with idiosyncratic schemes that rescue past styles from redundancy. In short, they design sustainably. Take this four-bedroom bungalow hybrid that was built in 1916 on a quarter-acre block in Melbourne’s leafy south-east Malvern. Recently altered and extended by Damien Lui of Honto Architecture, it unashamedly revels in the original plan (centring on an entrance hallway) and the detail of the period’s paralleling Arts and Crafts movement. Hall and Richardson were brought into the project early to draft a document for the direction of the interior fit-out and furnishings. In concept and specified collections, they drew on the detail of the original architecture and the design adventure of Kit Kemp’s London hotels — loved by the client for their cross-cultural chaos, colour and clash of periods. Richardson and Hall’s first order of business was to emulate the wide-plank floors in Soho’s Ham Yard Hotel with scraped-back American oak and to replicate its front-of-house welcome with Haymes Paint’s Minimalist 1 — a chalky white that, like Ham Yard, concedes to colour in outlying rooms. They redefined the formal dining room as a salon, inserting the dining room into a sequence of open living spaces at the house’s rear. “The salon was really our starting point for the whole house and it was a luxurious opportunity,” says Hall, laughing that such a fantastic prospect put their collective heads in the clouds “in the form of Fornasetti’s cumulus covered Nuvolette wallpaper”. It was laid in an encircling band above the room’s white panelling, creating a stylised stratosphere that instantly dictated accents of solar yellow and sky blue — the colour of velvet used by Alexander J Cook to reupholster a sorry 1940s Italian sofa into sumptuous diamond quilt decadence.
IAccording to Hall, the client — “a long-time friend and lover of vintage design” — dived into their inspiration document, actively searching for the old pieces that would make the salon’s sunny atmosphere palpable. She found her ‘solar flashes’ at Capocchi in a set of Louis XVI-style chairs in leather the colour of a setting sun. They now radiate from a Saarinen Tulip table, their classicism seemingly at ease in a room that engages with all eras — a 1950s rosewood sideboard by Ico Parisi sidles up against a ’60s Italian glass-faced console; while an Ettore Sottsass Memphis ceramic makes conversation with Marcello Fantoni’s Mid-century vases. All sit on a contemporary Nepalese rug from Loom that reiterates the Arts and Crafts geometries of the architecture’s ornament. This happy clash of pattern and period flow into the property’s rear rooms, where an open plan of living, dining and kitchen feature similar auction finds refashioned into fabulous. The all-white dining table with the fetching turned legs was found languishing in Leonard Joel’s auctions rooms as a piece of unloved brown Victoriana. “White paint and a massive piece of Calacatta marble later and you’ve got one-of-a-kind gorgeous,” says Richardson. “It was all about those shapely legs.” Its monumentality is matched by Ochre’s contemporary take on the baronial chandelier and its mess of modern material and master craft repeats in a triptych of silver-etched mirrors made by Peter Nyary. “You need to find the things you love,” says Richardson, proffering advice on the realisation of personally resonant rooms. “It’s a cliché, but it’s true.”