This Soothing Sydney Home Hides A Sun-Drenched Courtyard
Interiors
The family home of interior designer Freya Salter.
The house has been carefully extended and renovated over the past three years.
A garden path leads to the front door.
The central courtyard fills the house with natural light.
‘The biggest hurdle was getting the windows and doors in, which required cranes and then manpower to manoeuvre large panels of glass into position,’ Freya says.
The Garden Studio worked on the landscape architecture.
‘Untitled’ by Joseph Rolella.
A timber screen nods to the house’s original Japanese-inspired interiors.
The sage-green themed kitchen.
‘Reality which shines under the envelope which envelopes it’ by Tomislav Nikolic.
The renovations also expanded space in the kitchen, living and dining to better suit Freya’s family of four.
Sliding doors increase the home’s indoor-outdoor connection.
Inside the living room.
Print 5/8 #9 by Mike Parr.
A new void enhanced the impact of the central courtyard.
One of the bathrooms. ‘Lincoln Centre, late afternoon’ by Annabel Butler.
Freya experimented with a textured wallpaper in their main bedroom.
The impressive timber wardrobes.
Silver accents stand out in the bathroom.
It took three and a half years for Freya Salter and her husband Richard Odie to carefully renovate their Woollahra residence.
‘We started in August 2020, and given the shortage of labour during that time, Richard built much of the house on his own,’ adds Freya, who also handled the house’s redesign.
In addition to reconfiguring rooms to improve the home’s privacy, insulation, and ventilation, the works extended the house towards the street and added a new third storey at the front.
‘The kitchen, dining and living room were all in one space, almost half the size it is now,’ Freya says.
The existing layout of the house featured two separate fibro and brick dwellings designed around a central courtyard, filling the house with natural light and a sense of space that the family loved. But as a designer with her own eponymous practice, Freya wanted to put a personal touch on the interiors, creating a new palette that referenced natural materials she recalled from her time working in southern Italy.
‘I love how the simplicity of painted brick, the limestone and the wood combined to create a layered, tranquil environment,’ she says.
They retained the side walls and the courtyard, enhancing this feature with a new double-height void that overlooks the garden. One of the biggest ‘hurdles’ of the renovations was simply getting the windows and glass doors into the property — ‘it required cranes and manpower to manoeuvre the large panels of glass into position’ — but the end result is part of what makes the home so serene.
The large windows bring the outdoors in almost every room, as the main bedroom upstairs now captures views out towards Cooper Park and Double Bay.
Sage green accents and chalky whites are paired alongside warm timbers in the kitchen, flowing into similar hues throughout the rest of the house — with the exception of the rust-coloured silken wallpaper in the couple’s bedroom. It’s a slightly moodier space, where deep-coloured carpets and thick luxurious curtains make the room feel like a private retreat.
‘I love our bedroom,’ Freya adds. ‘The outlook is beautiful. We see over the trees in the day, and the sparkling city lights at night.’