Victoria St

It is no mean feat to respond to a brief that calls for creating a family home that manages to straddle the relatively polar ideals of ‘calmness’ and ‘impactful’. However, in her Victoria Street project, interior designer Lauren Egan has achieved just that – a fully resolved scheme of tranquillity that still packs a punch in its materiality and colour palette.

Expressing an interest in the ‘Scandanese’ aesthetic, and a desire to invest in quality, locally made design, the owners engaged Project 12 Architecture for the structural design and joinery, and Lauren for all of the interior decisions. With a modest budget, attention was paid to adding tactile bespoke elements for maximum effect, such as the hand-trowelled concrete bench and handcrafted Anchor Ceramic tiles in the kitchen.

Wall colour choices throughout mostly reflect the environment. In the living and dining areas, a palette of toasty brown and muddy greys provide calm connectivity to the old and new areas of the home. However, it is the occasional hit of unexpected and playful colour that creates the desired jolt to the senses, and lets you know that the home does not take itself too seriously. A vivid, almost Yves Klein blue bench adorns the entrance hall, and a similarly hued rug enlivens the sitting room. And in an unexpected treat for the eyes, that blue appears again in a study nook in a child’s bedroom.

Again, happily disrupting the sense of calm, a lush emerald green carpet covers the stairs leading up to the master bedroom suite. The mood then flips back to serenity, with walls painted in a muddy eucalypt, relaxed linen bedding and views to the greenery outside. From here another surprise awaits; in a restrained yet striking counterpoint to the serenity of the adjoining bedroom, the ensuite is tiled almost head-to-toe in Fibonacci’s Abstrakt.

“I knew I wanted to use a terrazzo early on in the planning and was inspired by use of terrazzo in some of the old shops and cafes in and around the inner-north. Most of them had these lovely chunks of stone, so when I saw Abstrakt I knew it was the one,” says Laure. “The colouring informed the use of matt black tapware and a light grey/mauve in the plastered walls that picks up the lighter grey marbles in the terrazzo.

Such is the success of the project that it has been shortlisted in the colour category for the 2020 IDEA Awards. “Lauren is one to watch – an emerging talent with a great skills creating interiors with not just functionality and style, but also the ability to create ‘moods, and moments’,” says Michael Karakolis, Founder of Fibonacci. “And, it’s always great to see our terrazzo used with such impact in smaller applications – size definitely does not always matter, and we treat every project the same”.