Inspiration - What We Have Now

One of the largest influences/sources of inspiration is our current home. For the last three years, we have lived in a two bedroom, two bathroom apartment built by one of Perth’s premium apartment builders in 2008.

When we decided it was time to move into something larger, we looked at pre-established homes, but struggled to find something that met the budget without needing significant renovation to match the style and standard of our current home. Building quickly became our only option.

Mirrors make a normally
small room appear larger

For that reason, when it came time to personalise the Rendezvous design, we began by incorporating everything we love about our “little box” in the city.

One of the first things you notice when walking through our apartment is the mirrors. Each bathroom has a lovely big mirror and each of the built in robes have mirror sliding doors.

Mirrors are a wonderful interior design tool, especially in small spaces where they help to enlarge the room by reflecting space and light.

Sliding doors are great. You save so much space by not having to allow room for the door to open. Surprisingly, upgrading the builder’s standard Redicoat doors to mirrored sliding doors did not cost as much as I would have expected.

What did surprise me was the cost to “upgrade” the bathroom mirrors from the builder’s standard framed mirror, to frameless with no visible fixings. I am glad I did not ask for a bevelled edge!

Our apartment mirrors, in addition to being frameless and with no visible fixings, sit flush with the vanity bench top. I love this look. People often ask whether not having a splash back means that the mirror requires more cleaning. Personally, I would not say that it does. We find that any overspray from the taps extends well above the height of a standard splashback anyway.


Our frameless ensuite mirror and
granite vanity bench top

Something that does require extra cleaning, are the black granite kitchen and vanity bench tops. I love these bench tops! Alas, as mentioned in a previous post, we will not be having granite in our new home *sob*.

The final thing I adore about our apartment is absence cornicing. Unfortunately, it would have been too big of a change remove the cornice from the design.

What elements of your current home would you incorporate into the next?

Milestone: External Colour Selection

Personally, I found choosing the external colours a lot harder than choosing the internal colours. The front of our house is different to the display home. Therefore, I find it difficult to imagine what it is going to look like, let alone visualise it painted with the colours suggested by Ventura’s consultant.

To help with my visualisation issues, I scanned the plans for our front elevation and created a “black line master” using Microsoft Paint, which I could then colour in when we got home.

"Black Line Master" for our version of the Rendezvous

If you would like me to make a tutorial on how to do this, feel free to ask via the comments section.

The exterior component of our colour consultation revolved primarily around the front elevation. We decided to choose varying shades of grey for the render and metalwork. Ventura’s colour consultant said this would help to tie the outside areas with the inside areas as it keeps with the white, grey/silver, black colour scheme used for the interior.

Prior to the meeting, the only shade of grey we had decided upon was the colour of the roof. Choosing the roof colour was easy; there were plenty of examples to look at during our daily commute.

The colour we chose was Windspray. We wanted a colour that was dark enough so that it would not look dirty during the winter, but not so dark that it would absorb of heat during summer.

Tip: If you are interested in thermal efficiency, the Colorbond website lists each of their roof colours along with the associated thermal classifications.

Thanks to our sales consultant Mike Tanner, we received a free upgrade to Colorbond guttering and downpipes (much appreciated!). This meant that the majority of colour selections came from the Colorbond colour pallet. We decided to continue this trend by choosing a render colour from this pallet also.

The colours that were chosen for the front elevation were Surfmist, Windspray and Monument. These three colours are very modern. The consultant recommended arranging them as follows:

Exterior colour scheme as suggested by Ventura’s colour consultant.

This colour scheme is not for the faint hearted due to the high level of contrast between the light main render and the dark project render and portico infill. It was not until I had created the above image that we realised just how light Surfmist is. We wanted a light grey house with a grey roof and dark gutters. Therefore, we decided to change the main render colour to Shale Grey.

Based on this new colour trio, we set about colouring in our “Black Line Master.” We managed to narrow the options down to the following two colour schemes:

Option One: Retain the bold highlights.



Option Two: Remove the bold highlights



In the end, we decided to use the more conservative Option 2. Therefore, our finalised external colour selection appears as follows:

Windspray roof; facia;  portico infill; front door; and,  garage door

Monument gutters

Shale Grey main render project render

Update (08/08/2011): Silly me forgot to mention what colour pavers we will be using for our driveway. If you had not guessed already, we will be using charcoal with a grey border.

Milestone: Internal Colour Selection

When it came to interior colour selection, we decided to keep things simple by selecting the same colours and materials throughout. This may seem a bit boring at first, but it allows us to accessorise each room individually, whilst maintaining a common feel between rooms.

We decided the best place to start making our selections was the kitchen. Typically, the kitchen is a home’s central gathering point. This is especially true for us. We love to host large dinner parties, where we spend all night sitting around the dining table. Therefore, it is crucial that we get the colours right!

Our current kitchen is quite small. It has silver cupboards, which look fantastic. However, we felt using a feature colour, such as silver, in a much larger kitchen would be over powering. We decided to play it safe and chose white cabinets - “Classic White Sheen” melamine by Polytec.

Choosing a bench top colour was not as straight forward as choosing the colour for our cabinets or kickboards.

Paired with the silver cabinets of our current kitchen, is a lovely black granite bench top. Despite the “extra work” to keep it clean, we would have loved to continue this trend into our new home. Fortunately/unfortunately, our builder supplies Essastone and we decided that it would be best to stick with that.

To be honest Essastone does not wow me. The current Essastone range has three colours that would suit our white/grey/black colour scheme: Carbon, French Black and Midnight Rendezvous.

The winning colour, by elimination, was Carbon. If it were not for the large black flecks in the French Black, it would have been the likely choice because the base colour complements our floor tiles. Midnight Rendezvous, unfortunately, would have left us longing for our current black granite bench tops. Essastone just does not have the shine, depth or warmth that granite has.

Kitchen Colour Scheme: floor tile,
bench top, cabinet and kickboard

Unfortunately, our budget did not extend to having Essastone bench tops in the Laundry. For this room Ventura’s colour consultant recommended using Laminex Basalt (Natural Finish) for the bench top, as it is the best match for Essastone Carbon.

Our final colour choice for the day was kickboard colour. Our colour consultant suggested brushed aluminium. In theory this would have looked great, however when paired with our chosen floor tiles, an aluminium kickboard became lost.

We decided to choose a darker kickboard. We did not want to be so bold as to choose black kickboards, so we opted for Laminex Charcoal (Natural Finish).

It is always a good idea to take samples of your kickboard, cabinet and bench top colours when you go searching for tiles. If we had not done this, we would not have realised that brushed aluminium was too light a colour to use for kickboards.

Another interesting observation was the influence of our tiles on Charcoal kickboards. When paired with white, Charcoal appears to be dark grey in colour. However, when paired with our floor tiles, it appears more blue.

Thankfully, this does not cause a problem in our colour scheme, however it is something worth keeping in mind, especially if you are choosing a more specific or bolder colour scheme than we are.