Premium Interior Design

The decisions that determine how a house feels to live in are made long before anyone chooses a paint colour. Ceiling heights, window sizes and positions, how daylight reaches the middle of the plan, where the stair sits and how rooms connect are all fixed at design stage.

Treating interiors as a decorating exercise that begins after lock-up means inheriting whatever the drawings produced. Treating them as part of the design means the finished rooms were intended rather than discovered.

We run interior selections alongside the build program so the decisions land in the right order — anything that gets buried is decided before it gets buried.

Structural and dimensional items first: window and door sizes and positions, ceiling heights, stair configuration and the location of wet areas. These are effectively fixed by frame stage.

Then anything with a long lead time, regardless of when it is installed — windows, external doors, stone benchtops, imported tapware and specific tiles all need ordering well ahead.

Then rough-in dependent items: tapware, shower configuration, power point and switch positions, data points and lighting layout, all of which are set before the walls are lined. Then surfaces, then fittings and hardware.

A build waiting on a client decision is a build losing days it never recovers, because trades booked for a sequence do not simply wait.

Deciding the overall direction first — warm or cool, light or dark, matte or gloss — turns hundreds of open questions into a series of choices within a defined range. It is the single most useful thing you can do to make selections manageable.

See materials physically. Screen images misrepresent colour and completely misrepresent texture. Get samples of tiles, benchtops and flooring and view them in the actual light of the room, at the time of day you will use it.

Decide with the whole house in view rather than room by room, so materials relate to each other rather than accumulating into a collection of individually good choices that do not sit together.

Material choices behave differently here. Dark surfaces in west-facing rooms hold heat. High-gloss finishes show every mark in the strong subtropical light. Timber moves with humidity, which affects joinery tolerances and flooring installation.

Window furnishings do real thermal work rather than decorative work. External shading on western glazing outperforms any internal blind, because it stops heat before it enters the building.

Near the coast, hardware and fixings need corrosion resistance appropriate to the salt exposure, including on items chosen for appearance rather than performance. A beautiful handle that pits within two years was the wrong specification.