Peach House

The Peach House takes the Australian barn as its starting point and reworks it for a family whose history runs six generations deep in brass and copper. Lisa Luppino of Loopea Design Studio drew that lineage through the whole home, letting metal, warmth and a confident use of colour shape a house that settles into its rural setting across a rolling pastoral site in the Yarra Valley. The project marked the launch of her practice, and it carries the clarity of a designer working to a firm point of view.

For Luppino, that point of view begins with materials. "Materials are the true storytellers of a project," she says. Before she is thinking about furniture or colour, her attention is already moving through possibilities of materiality, because that is what shapes how a space feels. She is careful to stay unbiased, listening to how a client wants a room to feel and then using material as the tool to reach that feeling. Every threshold, corner and transition asks for something slightly different.

At Peach House, the brief was for openness without open-plan living, and that made the relationship between materials important. Rather than leaning on walls alone, Luppino used material to define moments and guide people gently through the home. Warm brass, timber and woven finishes sit alongside cooler, more mineral surfaces like terrazzo, brick and stone, in what she describes as a layered dialogue where contrast feels balanced rather than competing.

That dialogue finds its clearest expression at the fireplace, which sits at one of the home's most important thresholds, marking the transition between the dining and living spaces at the end of the hall beyond the giant copper entry door. It needed to feel grounded and permanent, an anchor that connected the materials around it rather than competing with them. Act Three felt right immediately. It carries a bold confidence that holds its own alongside the brass-clad firewood storage, the textured brickwork and the warmth of timber. Its palette almost felt destined for the project, with peach tones that quietly nod to the home's name, deep charcoal fragments that echo the exterior cladding, and earthy colours at home around the fire.

Terrazzo was the right technical choice too. It withstands the demands of a hardworking fireplace and extends into the integrated drawer storage, so the whole element reads as one sculptural piece rather than separate materials stitched together. "Terrazzo already feels like a collection of materials in itself," Luppino says. Every fragment catches the light differently and reveals something new over time, so the fireplace never feels static.

Away from the fire, the private spaces move to a quieter register. Across two bathrooms, terrazzo shifts from anchor to grounding surface. Polarity runs across a benchtop, a grey field holding angular chips of white, black and green. The green is restrained and easy to miss at first glance, the kind of detail that reveals itself to anyone who looks a second time. Ghosted brings a lighter, neutral surface to the second space, holding the room without asking for attention.

The triple-stacked bullnose belongs to a design language Luppino runs through the home, a vocabulary of curved and faceted profiles. In the walk-in robe, a terrazzo-topped island repeats that detail from the kitchen, and Polarity is drawn through a second time, deliberately linking the benchtop in the bathroom to the island in the robe so the material reads as a considered thread rather than a single gesture.