Viva la Carmelina

Architect Scott Weston is a big believer in colour, pattern and decoration and an ability to borrow from the past and reinvent it to a modern framework is his forte. So when he and partner, gossip columnist Andrew Hornery, first set eyes on a dilapidated 1889 Victorian terrace in South Paddington four years ago, they immediately saw the enormous potential.

“When we walked through the front door, it was like walking into a Charles Dickens Miss Havisham film set,” Weston says. “Everything had stopped in time and while the old bones of the building were there, it was all crumbling and had fallen into disrepair as the owner grew older. Yet there was enough to look at and say, 'Wow, this is a beautiful old grand Italianate terrace’.”

The property — which the couple named Villa Carmelina after Hornery’s late mother, who was of Maltese extraction — was one of the last in Paddington that had a stable at the rear. 

“We felt that while it was a big home there was potential to convert the stables into a separate dwelling, which is what we did,” says Weston. “From a heritage conservation perspective we kept the front main terrace, and the rear stable, and built a totally modern addition in between.”

In a bid to create a unique property, Weston called on his reservoir of suppliers and contacts to bring a sense of the individual and the bespoke to the house. The result was a suite of customised materials, finishes and even paint colours to create a space no one else had, or had even dreamed of. 

He started by considering fragments of colours that had remained in the house, using those to extrapolate shades for whole rooms. Paint company Wattyl created for him a custom-paint collection, named Villa Carmelina, to accompany the restoration.

The palette is a study in muted, dusty pastels and retro colour pops — some custom matched, others already from the Wattyl fandeck — that range in hue from the peachy Jazz Age Coral and flamingoesque Edite’s Pink, to subtle shades of fawn, grey, ivory and mauve that carry names such as Miss Havisham Rose, Modernist, Matcha Tea, Studio Mauve, Ivory Grey, Curious Planet, Lemon Chiffon and Marcasite.

“The house was trapped in another era,” Weston says. “The owner, a dentist, was Latvian and her husband Mexican, so in 1958 when they bought the house, they had overlaid it with their own 1950s colour sense and design principles. The things they bought were beautiful things — Axminster carpets, silk curtains.

“There were amazing colours in the top room, where the former owner used to smoke, so we jokingly called it the Nicotine Room. It had pink floorboards, orange curtains, beautiful Indian colours, and yellowy-bone-white walls. The paint was the perfect ivory white because it had been stained by nicotine, and we wanted to capture its amazing patina.

“Wattyl were great because I could take references to them, wallpaper samples, fabric swatches, a Japanese fold-out book I have, which is a great colour source, and the technician I worked with would colour match things and give me little sample pots,” Weston says. 

“Then over about a month, I would do sample pot testing throughout the house at different times of the day to see what that colour was, which enabled me to fine-tune and tint the paints a little more or little less to get the formulas right.”

The floorboards that were almost Mexican pink were repainted in Edite’s Pink in a homage to the old house. Also preserved was the peeling, mint green painted walls on the front verandah. Any loose, flaky paint was removed and cleaned up, and a varnish applied over the top to conserve coatings and plaster layers.

Traditionally, old terraces had bi-fold doors between the living and dining rooms, but they had been removed from this house. Weston wanted to restore them and create a layering effect similar to what you find in French apartments. 

He divided the space with a twist, using a Chinese moon gate screen found at Zhongshan antique furniture market outside Hong Kong where building materials are resold. Doubling as a shelving system, Weston had it shipped to Australia direct to the house where it sat while building work was going on around it. 

Other pieces Weston had for more than 25 years that he included in the restoration included furniture from the Herman Miller showroom and Grant Featherstone chairs salvaged from his work at the Medusa hotel on Oxford St, Darlinghurst.

“These are the things I’ve always loved and wanted and I consider myself to be a custodian of them,” he says. “I don’t want to buy something that after three years has fallen apart and hasn’t been terribly well made.”

The bathroom is a modern, 4m-high aluminium box that overhangs from the side of the house, covered entirely in a beautiful backdrop of Bisazza bouquet mosaic tiles that cascade down the wall on to the floor. Giving a nod to Dutch still-life paintings Weston has always admired, it’s a mesmerising space that ties perfectly with the secret spaces on the flat courtyard roofs over the new contemporary additions behind the house. 

Here Weston reinvented the old vitrified porcelain French tile, so that when you step out on to these external landscaped rooms, it’s as though you are walking on to a field, created from tiles of beautiful green lawn, studded with hexagonal tiles of lilac and pastel pink flowers. 

Lilac is echoed in the kitchen with the use of a tile system that covers the 3.6m-long bench that’s part of an open-plan living space. The lilac-grey colour is called Dew and works in contrast with the blue cabinetry, painted in Curious Planet, inspired by a collection of marbles Weston had as a child. The biggest marble was see-through but for the deep colour inside that reminded him of looking down to earth as you would from a satellite photo.

After two-and-a-half years of considered renovation, Weston has stamped a thrilling new dimension to a gracious terrace, a fitting nod to the past that looks eagerly to the future.

wattyl.com.au/VillaCarmelina