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Bradford Road by Planned Living Architects and Kate Walker Design
Building her dramatic holiday home on the Mornington Peninsula from the ground up gave Interior Designstein founder Aisha Chaudhry a deeper understanding of creating high-end homes that tell a story.
On Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, Bradford Road is a house with a story. Its black steel cladding and dramatic angles make a striking contrast with the sweeping ocean views that open out from every direction. Inside, neutral tones and sculptural details – think an undulating staircase and tactile furniture – bring warmth to a high-end home of clean lines and monolithic proportions. “It’s lived-in. It’s a place for barefoot kids and dinners with family and friends, for quiet mornings and wild energy. It feels like us,” says Aisha Chaudhry, the founder of Interior Designstein and owner of the home.
Though Chaudhry didn’t design the home herself, she says it’s a reflection of her journey and what she’s learned on her way to becoming an interior designer. She switched from software development to interior design seven years into her career, returning to university to follow a career path she found inspiring rather than just “logical and secure”. She named her company Interior Designstein, a reference to the scientific aspect of her previous career. Finding it difficult to get a start in the industry, she volunteered for Julia Green at Greenhouse Interiors, where she worked on campaigns for major clients while also styling magazine shoots.
This passion for design and styling fed into Chaudhry’s next step: with her husband, Khurram, a property developer, she found a block on the Mornington Peninsula and began the process of building a dream home from the ground up. She engaged Planned Living Architects to design a residence that “spoke to the landscape rather than sitting on top of it”, and which captured the extraordinary ocean views from every room.
On design duties was Kate Walker Design; Chaudry had worked with the team as a stylist in the past. The result is a series of rooms that find beauty and comfort in the intersection between hard edges and materials – such as polished concrete flooring, terrazzo tiles and a Calacatta Viola countertop from Corsi and Nicolai in the master bathroom – and warm joinery and soft furnishings, including a curved 1977 sofa by King Living.
In one bedroom, Manhattan ‘Beige’ handmade loop-pile wool carpet from KWD&Co brings tactility and offsets the walls, painted in Dulux Snowy Mountains Half; in the kitchen, a monumental island is topped with a slab of teal-hued Verde Riviera quartzite from Corsi and Nicolai, leavened by Moroccan Zellige pink tiles, also from KWD&Co.
While the completed home offers a coastal retreat for Chaudhry and her family, it’s also a reflection of her creativity. And the experience of building it galvanised Chaudhry to take the next step in her career: she joined Amelia Barry Interiors as an interior designer, using her personal journey of channelling emotion into her home to bring her clients’ visions to life. “Now, my focus is on designing high-end residential homes that tell real stories, just like ours does.”
Architecture by Planned Living Architects. Interior design by Kate Walker Design. Build by Smith Builders. Landscape design by COS Design. Artwork by Yolan Eke, Ash Holmes, Petrina Jose, Michelle Keighley, Marcia Priestley and Chanel Sohier.
