Simply The Best

When the team from Three Birds Renovations decided to create a namesake project home, they put all their favourite elements together under one roof.

- Elizabeth Wilson

As the CEO of home-design company Three Birds Renovations, Candice Fernandez knows a thing or two about the business of achieving a dream home. Recently, she and her family experienced first-hand just how life-transforming that journey can be.

Candice and her husband Drewe Letchford had always known it was a matter of time (and savings) until they renovated. With three growing children – Mia, 13, Joe, 11 and Hunter, four – in a singlestorey 1930s home, the irrefutable fact was that they needed more space.

They loved the neighbourhood and didn’t want to move, so they developed plans for a second-storey extension. They had selected a builder, paid a deposit and were poised to commence work – when they had an extraordinary change of plans.

It just so happened that Candice had been busy overseeing an altogether different building project as part of her work. In collaboration with building company Rawson Homes, she and the ‘Birds’ co-founders Lana Taylor, Bonnie Hindmarsh and Erin Cayless were finalising plans for a Three Birds project home. The concept? To create a beautiful design within a budget, built to reflect the Three Birds signature ‘look’, with finishes and fittings all selected by Lana, Bonnie and Erin. After a long design phase, they had arrived at a template floor plan: they just needed to find a real-life knock-down/rebuild test case. Cue Candice’s lightbulb moment.

She came home from work with a proposition for Drewe: that they be the first ones to build this Three Birds project home. “I knew we’d have to forfeit the deposit we’d paid, but I also knew the value of building a dream home versus working with what we had.” Drewe was open to this curve ball.