Interior Design: Smac Studio
Photography: Anson Smart
For two years, Craig and Jenna Carracher lived in this Woollahra house as tenants, learning where daylight disappeared, which rooms interrupted conversation, and how naturally its leafy Sydney setting encouraged people to stay. They were already thoroughly attached when they began a rather charming campaign to buy it, renting the property over holiday periods in the hope that its owner might become accustomed to life without it. Somehow, the strategy worked, and affection was followed by possession.
The 444-square-metre house was designed in 1981, its circular skylights and distinctive spatial gestures giving the building a character worth keeping. When the owners embarked on its transformation, they wanted a home for music, travel, family life, and frequent entertaining, then offered the sort of instruction designers spend their careers waiting to hear: be really creative. The arrival of their first child during the renovation made the brief more exacting, although evidently no less spirited.
Only a handful of walls were removed, yet the way the ground floor worked was fundamentally changed. A solitary bedroom that once separated the kitchen from the living spaces disappeared, replaced by an open, curved room illuminated by a pink Murano chandelier. Upstairs, the primary suite moved into the former study, gaining direct access to a north-facing terrace, while its previous location was reorganised into two bedrooms and a new bathroom.
The kitchen now performs as the social centre, with a generous island facing into the room so that cooking need never exile anyone from the conversation. Rosa Murcia and creamy Calacatta Oro marble form a blush-and-cream checkerboard underfoot, while Calacatta Oro rises to the ceiling, wrapping the joinery in softly figured stone. Outside, burgundy-and-white pool tiles repeat the geometry, giving the garden a visual connection to the interior without the labour of matching everything.
Colour moves through the house with equal confidence. Pink appears in lighting and upholstery, while green is used in broader, calmer gestures, most dramatically in the onyx-lined powder room. Two new bathrooms take their cue from the floors of Phoebe Philo-era Celine boutiques, with narrow lengths of differently coloured marble laid in irregular bands. Existing circular skylights were retained, and new examples repeat the original language, allowing the renovation to converse with the house rather than lecture it.
Music provides another organising rhythm. Custom brass shelving gives the owners’ record collection architectural presence, a grand piano occupies the room without apology, and a curved sofa by Pierre Augustin Rose encourages conversation from every angle. India Mahdavi’s Best Friend chairs and vintage Murano lighting add saturated notes to the ecru, timber, and bronze foundation, although the rooms retain the essential ease required for children’s toys, pizza nights, and records played properly loudly.
The owners call the result “Modeco”, their shorthand for modern life accommodated within the house’s Art Deco spirit. It is an affectionate description of an interior that feels collected, sociable, and entirely personal, as though the family had not renovated the home so much as finally allowed it to become the place they recognised while still paying rent.
