Every day feels like a holiday in this Earlwood family home in Sydney’s southwest.
From the Spanish handmade tiles to the limewashed walls, the whole house radiates a ‘retreat-like’ ambience thanks to a comprehensive redesign by Studio Noema.
The clients engaged the interior design firm — co-founded by Tess McGinness and Tara Kerse — to create a new interior palette reminiscent of villas and holiday houses they’d seen on their European travels.
The front of the house was retained and given a ‘facelift’, but the rest was relocated and extended, adding a new second level, back terrace, pool and a small garden at the rear.
‘They wanted to replicate the sun-drenched, earthy aesthetics of Sicily, Greece and Southern France,’ Tess says.
‘With such a hearty brief from our clients, it was so easy to draw from that inspiration and visualise how it would all come together.’
They took cues from the beach clubs of Mykonos, the dusty old tiles from a villa in Tuscany, Sicilian checkered tiled gardens filled with lemon and olives and warm bars in Milan to come up with the rich material palette.
‘It was important that the home felt relaxed yet elevated whilst also playing with accented colour, tone and texture,’ Tess adds.
Almost every room now features limewashed wall paint with hammered limestone tiles underfoot. In the kitchen, this subtle backdrop makes way for more eye-catching moments, including the amber-coloured stone benchtop, green joinery and a matching green arch with a recessed splashback of checkered tiles.
‘We wanted to inject colour where we could in a way that didn’t compete with the pattern, but sat nicely side by side,’ Tess says.
Patterns and soft curves are a hero feature throughout the entire home. Romantic archways form functional partitions in the bathrooms and a checkerboard of black-and-white lines the perimeter of the pool.
There’s also a particularly lavish ensuite likened to a steam room, where a curved shower is covered in a mosaic of aquamarine-blue tinged tiles.
Studio Noema also sourced a collection of timber furniture for the living room, paired with stonewashed linens curtains, handmade jute rugs, and raw metals that will all develop a beautiful patina over time.
Entertainers at heart, the family have relished the new and improved iteration of their home. Now dubbed Villa Rilassare, the house is a true ‘sanctuary’, complete with lemon trees, olive trees, and some climbing bougainvillea too.
