Article Roundup
A Woollahra home that was once the residence and studio of Charles Blackman has just been reimagined by Kaiko Design Interiors, and featured in Vogue Living. Two of the sofas throughout the house are ours. It is the kind of project we would want to talk about even if we had no furniture in it at all, so here is a longer look at what we loved.
Credits: Interior design and decoration: Kaiko Design Interiors. Photography: Pablo Veiga. Styling: Holly Irvine. Words (Vogue Living feature): Saskia Tillers. Full tour available via Vogue Living.
Colour as structure, not decoration
Most colour-led interiors treat colour as an accent: a cushion here, an artwork there, layered over a neutral shell. This house does the opposite. Principal designer Nicholas Kaiko has said the brief was built around "colour as structure, not decoration." Colour is not applied to the architecture here, it is the architecture.
You see it immediately in the kitchen, where emerald green cabinetry meets a fleshy, dirty pink that wraps the walls, ceilings and skirtings without a break. Curved orange gloss joinery frames the cooking bay like a piece of furniture in its own right, brass fittings catching the colour rather than cutting against it. Nowhere does the eye land on a "safe" white wall to rest on, because there almost isn't one. The one deliberate exception, a walk-in robe lit by a custom white horsehair pendant, only proves the rule: it is used once, on purpose, as a quiet nod to the room's history as part of Blackman's own studio.
It is a genuinely difficult thing to pull off. Saturated, maximalist palettes usually read as loud or chaotic. This one reads as calm, which is a testament to how disciplined the material choices are underneath all that colour.
