Lofty vision ahead of the curve

While everyone loves a view, it often overlooks our interiors.

''You see it all the time - big houses with massive, expansive views,'' says interior designer Hamish Guthrie. ''They are almost too view-obsessed. They fail to embrace the things which make interior spaces successful, and that's that level of intimacy and attention to detail. Pushing harder on those elements that are going to sustain itself beyond just a view.''

Adrian Amore's award-winning Loft design does both. In a gutted apartment in an old butter factory in West Melbourne, Amore inserted a white staircase that is more akin to a sculpture. Somewhere between a ribbon and icing, the sinuous staircase draws you up from the entrance, through a mezzanine, and beyond to a recreational deck overlooking the city and the west.

Opening up the roof to obtain the view drove the ''limited budget'' refurbishment. But it's the vision inside the 214-square-metre Loft Apartment that this week won the project the Australian Interior Design Award's highest achievement, the Premier Award for Interior Design Excellence and Innovation, as well as awards for residential design and best of state - residential (Victoria).

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For Guthrie, one of the award jury members, the Loft Apartment is ''an interior exercise in how to maximise use of an internal space''. Fellow jury member Joanne Cys goes further: ''Finally we've got an apartment that actually plays with the space and maximises the potential of its volume, and makes it beautiful, sculptural and highly functional. You'll see it often in stand-alone residences, or in apartment foyers, but not so much in apartments themselves.''

If the stairs are the drawcard, the defining shape to the interior is its curves on both stairs and walls. ''The shape evolved out of looking at potential movement patterns through that floor space depending on how it was used,'' says the 40-year-old architect.

The entrance directs people left, around the pantry and kitchen, towards either the stairs or past a curved ''island'' containing the bathroom and laundry. The stairs also help define the space, providing privacy to the living and dining areas.

A storage compartment has been inserted into a thickened rear wall. Both the lower ceiling height in the living space and the black wall create a sense of intimacy and warmth. This balances the lofty height over the kitchen up through the 9-metre void.

The use of white accentuates the curves and forms of the plasterboard stair and walls and also provides ''quietness'', says Amore. Paradoxically, it also helps ''maximise the drama'' of the space, giving the interior and stairs a sense of heightened scale. The neutral palette allows the furniture to provide colour accents and further personality to the space.

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Lofty vision ahead of the curve