Awash with natural light, this dual accommodation on the Gold Coast mixes calming pastels with energetic pops of sorbet-flavoured colour.
Photography Coastpark Creative / Words Casey Hutton / The Villas by Bilinga Beach Abodes
BEFORE
Back in 2020, Sarah and Aaron Waters fell in love with an idiosyncratic 1960s building in Bilinga on Queensland’s Gold Coast. “From the outside, you’d think that it was just a standalone house, but on the inside it was two three-bedroom units layered on top of each other,” Aaron explains. “At first, we didn’t know what to call them. Were they units or were they a duplex?”
They dubbed them ‘The Villas’, and embarked on a detailed two-year renovation where both apartments were retained but completely reworked.
Sarah, who owns baby bedding and accessories business Bubbles Lane, and Aaron (aka Aza), co-founder and Head of Operations at Balter Brewing, have a penchant for renovating 1960s homes. Back in 2008, they transformed a dowdy ’60s beach shack into ‘Bilinga Beach Abode’, a stylish Palm Springs-inspired haven that they now live in with their three children.
This time round, they worked within the building’s existing footprint, removing asbestos and crooked walls along the way. “We are so proud that we kept as much as possible of the original building,” says Aza. “Let’s just say we threw it in the washing machine and then put it through the dryer and gave it an iron.”
The completed reno is a knockout, owing largely to its joyful and ambitious use of colour, pattern, and texture. Aza explains that flooding the building with natural light was crucial to making those interior elements sing; they lifted the original roof to accommodate soaring raked ceilings and admitted as much light as possible without compromising on privacy.
Their biggest design gamble became their favourite feature: a dramatic helical staircase leading to a new loft in the upstairs villa. “We wanted it to be a work of art,” Sarah says of the staircase, which is rendered in Venetian plaster with a luxurious ‘Oyster’ finish. “Tiling the rise of the stairs with some leftover tiles from our bathroom added another pop of colour against our sage-green kitchen.”
Throughout The Villas, contemporary furnishings with a retro flavour pay homage to its iconic coastal location, while the bold use of convex panelling from Easycraft’s ‘Silhouette’ range puts a modern spin on classic beachy VJs. “We wanted to veer away from the standard gyprock finish,” Aza explains. “The folks at Easycraft assumed we were thinking of just a feature wall here or there, but once we told them the quantity we were chasing they nearly fell off their chairs!” he chuckles. “Amazingly, Easycraft recycled 100 percent of offcuts from our project back into making new products.”
