Vaucluse Courtyard
A leftover side return reshaped into the most-used room of a Vaucluse home — a small, layered courtyard for morning coffee and slow evenings.
A leftover side return reshaped into the most-used room of a Vaucluse home — a small, layered courtyard for morning coffee and slow evenings.
The brief was modest: do something with the three-metre gap between the kitchen and the boundary wall. What emerged is a planted room that the family now treats as the heart of the house.
We sunk the paving by 200mm to ground the space, ran a long bluestone bench seat along the boundary, and built up a deep planting bed against the kitchen wall. A single multi-trunk lilly pilly anchors the corner, its canopy throwing dappled light onto the bench through the afternoon. The planting is intentionally restrained — three textures, two flowering moments a year, and ground covers that knit the floor together within eight months.
Every surface was chosen to weather rather than wear: hand-set Castlemaine bluestone, a single piece of bench-formed concrete, and a steel rill that fills with rainwater from the kitchen roof. Twelve months on, the moss between the pavers has begun to do exactly what we hoped.
We respond to new project enquiries within three working days. There is a short waitlist — we typically begin new design work eight to twelve weeks after the first conversation.