Creative teamwork pays big dividends

Family home: Sandringham House collaboratively designed and styled by Doherty Design Studio and Techne Architecture + Interior. Photo: Derek Swalwell

Collaboration between an architectural firm and an interior designer effected a really neat extension to a medium-sized late Victorian Hampton cottage.

For this project for the young family of hoteliers Doug and Jenny Maskiell, "neat" is a compliment, because the outcome of Techne Architecture and interior designer Mardi Doherty colluding from the planning stage resulted in a home that masterfully negotiates the line of being not too big or too small, too minimalist or too fussy.

With Techne doing the bones and raising the formerly single-level weatherboard structure to a light-flooded but contained double-storey home of four bedrooms and three bathrooms, and with Doherty finessing appointments so there is entertaining detail in every aspect, the house came out just right.

Sleek kitchen: Sandringham House collaboratively designed and styled by Doherty Design Studio and Techne Architecture + Interior. Photo: Derek Swalwell

It also embodies an odd request in the brief the Maskiells outlined for a "rickety" structure that had descended to "becoming a knock-down job"."We wanted," Doug Maskiell says, "a beautiful old house with character to also be interesting, open-plan, functional and fun."

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He reckons he got all that. "There's something to look at everywhere. It's not claustrophobic, and every wall and surface has something interesting going on." Ditto that! In a shape, a texture, a quirky key colouration (blue, orange and pops of pink), and in the confident variety of the decor detailing, (different tiles on every tiled surface), there is always something to notice.

Justin Northrop, director of Techne, protests "the shell [of the house] is not complicated". "Geometrically, it is simple. The whole design process was to get the volumetric composition to work, so that it goes together. But, so that it also allowed Mardi to put in all those details, without being over the top."

Anything but ordinary: Sandringham House collaboratively designed and styled by Doherty Design Studio and Techne Architecture + Interior. Photo: Derek Swalwell

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Creative teamwork pays big dividends