Peter and Bernadette’s exotic Pittwater home is a fascinating melting pot of the places they have travelled to, their origins in Brussels and a love for their adopted home.
As you walk through the fabulous double doors and take in the vast interior and magical view of the water beyond, it’s easy to imagine you’re in a five-star resort in the Pacific, Asia, or even Africa – and that at any moment a butler is going to emerge offering delightful cocktails served on a silver tray.
Partly Colonial in style and channeling the feel of the old-world tropics, Bernadette and Peter have seamlessly blended influences from tropical Australia, Africa and their European heritage in their magnificent home.
Everywhere you look in this house, there is something fascinating, and every piece has a story attached to it or interesting origins. White walls and sandy coloured travertine floors provide the canvas for all the exotic and eclectic pieces collected in this home – from woven baskets and bags to African-inspired cushions, dried seaweed and coral, a zebra skin rug and heavy antique furniture. These are infused with elements of Europe in pieces such as elegant French-style furniture, feminine lamps and contemporary art.
Plenty of rattan and wicker complete the picture, working together to create a luxurious home that emulates the world’s finest resorts.
DAILY HOLIDAY
Peter and Bernadette deliberately wanted to impart the feeling of a luxury retreat. “We entertain a lot and wanted to re-create a relaxed ‘resort’ feel like we had experienced on various holidays,” says Bernadette.
Their unique and somewhat eclectic home has been painstakingly layered while retaining a sense of effortless style. “It’s a mix between our upbringing in Belgium combined with our experience in Australia and our love of everything colonial and tropical,” Bernadette says.
Tying together so many different styles and themes would be challenging for even the best decorators, but Bernadette’s natural flair and her ability to strike a balance between contrasting textures and materials can be seen throughout the home.
“We wanted it to be timeless and elegant yet comfortable rather than just a museum of our precious bits and pieces that we’d collected over the years,” she adds. And rather than just a show home displaying the things they like, it’s a display of who they are with a tapestry of memories and experiences in every room.
BUILDING BLOCKS
The couple has now been in the home for eight years, and since moving in, the property has literally been transformed. But it was no quick reno – Peter says that on and off they spent about five years doing up the house.
“We started off doing a few cosmetic things, with each task only creating more jobs that needed fixing before we could do what we wanted to do. So, in the end, we started at the beginning and did everything from the ground up,” he says.
And he means this quite literally, as they took the inside back to bare concrete and re-laid the entire flooring – replacing 18 different finishes with travertine throughout. But that was just the beginning as all the ceilings needed to be replaced and every interior wall had to be redone. Peter and Bernadette opened up the upstairs part of the house, extended out the front and placed a carport on top, extended out the side and expanded the upstairs bathrooms and built a deck surrounding the existing pool downstairs. The roof also needed to be properly supported, repaired (old tiles were replaced by Colorbond steel) and extended to cover the back deck.
There was just as much work to do on the outside of the house. After rendering the exterior, it was then time to get stuck into the landscaping. “There was no garden to speak of and the old driveway had to be jack-hammered up and replaced with the garden out front. A floating boardwalk was then added and connected the bottom of the house with the top verandah,” Peter says.
To gain some much-needed privacy from the neighbours on the south side, they then built planter boxes running down the length of the wall and planted trees, which now provide excellent screening.
Story by Sunny de Bruyn
Photography by Ryan Hernandez
Styling by Kathryn Borglund