A Balanced Softness – Bronte Home by Kate Bell Design and Smyth & Smyth

As an embrace of colour and light, Bronte Home captures the spirit of its owners and their many collections. Connecting to a sense of place through lightness. Kate Bell Design together with Smyth & Smyth dutifully endow the multi-level home with a series of curated gestures to balance between the natural and the built.

As a new build in Sydney’s Bronte, the same-named home draws on rudiments inspired by its coastal setting to conjure a home of natural and balanced proportions. Low-maintenance mechanisms are interwoven into the home through select materiality, ensuring an embedded longevity and fitting appropriateness to the needs of family life. A key consideration was the ease of incorporation of the existing and collected furniture, artwork and objects of the clients, while the resulting home needed to facilitate and allow cohabitation through a curated lens. With the interior design and courtyard by Kate Bell Design, together with architecture by Smyth & Smyth, Bronte Home openly invites natural light deep into its spaces to create an inviting, warm and calming atmosphere.

Low-maintenance mechanisms are interwoven into the home through select materiality, ensuring an embedded longevity and fitting appropriateness to the needs of family life.

Built by PHD Building, together with joinery by McGee Projects, Bronte Home sees a muted base palette layered to achieve a welcomed richness and depth. Through the insertion of select colour and the owner’s own pieces, each space is transformed into a reflective extension of its occupants. Within the rectilinear form of the home’s volume, polished concrete flooring under foot anchors the home to its site and location, while plush floor coverings insert experiential variation. The warmth of the encasing timber is brought internally also, while the architectural language, outlined by the precast concrete structural panels, ensures a robust resilience.

Balance is key to Bronte Home, with the architecture and interior elements working to complement one another, acting as countering gestures. Maximising its efficiency, the home stretches lengthways down the site with a rectilinear floor plate, while open and generous apertures connect the home to its siting and to the natural. Rendered French wash walls work with the warming nature of the timber clad ceiling, both grounding and adding texture to the interior spaces. Permanent and in-built joinery then also sees seating elements emerge from the floor surface and sculpt out the fireplace and stair features. The rear courtyard incorporates a similar approach, with the weighted and permanent incorporation of amenity, the BBQ and seating.

A key consideration was the ease of incorporation of the existing and collected furniture, artwork and objects of the clients, while the resulting home needed to facilitate and allow cohabitation through a curated lens.

Through a concentration of colour and restraint, Kate Bell Design and Smyth & Smyth’s Bronte Home is an equalised environment of strengthened heftiness and softness, enlivened by its owners own unique assemblage of elements.