PETITE RETREAT

Despite its harbour-side views, this Sydney pied-à-terre takes an inward-looking approach with cocooning tones, light plays and smart use of materials

- PIET SMEDY

There are certain approaches to appointing a coastal home that have become so often repeated that they are, today, considered decorating law. ‘A seamless transition between indoor and outdoor spaces’ – or its truncated form: ‘indoor/outdoor living’ – has been bandied about by decorators and design magazines (even we at House & Garden plead guilty) to the point of banality.

‘Dark walls make for small rooms’ is another, with the virtues of non-commital paint tones with dubiously whimsical names such as ‘Banana Dream’ and ‘Sunflower Symphony’ (these are very much real paint names, available in store right now) extolled for their nearmythic ability to create the perception of more space. And then, of course, there’s ‘barefoot luxury’, perhaps the only smug oxymoron in the English language, its natural habitat some whitewashed finca on a far-fromthe-crowds Ibizan coastline or Byzantine-church-turned family-bolthole overlooking the Aegean. And while these design concepts have remained evergreen because, yes, they do work especially well when applied to a seaside home, sometimes the ideological road less travelled produces even more impactful and, dare we go there, original results.