Perched on a steep, tree-lined road opposite Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens, this home, aptly named Botanical House, is a study in theatrical reinvention. Originally built in 1927, the grand South Yarra residence had departed from the area’s prevailing Art Deco language. Both an invitation to restore and re-invent, Mim Design‘s team restored the original character of the home in collaboration with builder and project management firm Lonsdale Group, while crafting an extension that reflects a contemporary milieu.
For Mim Design founder Miriam Fanning, the inherent challenge in Botanical House was less about restoration than translation. The clients (long-time occupants of 27 years), approached the redesign with what Fanning describes as an “unconstrained brief,” allowing the studio to explore “boundary-pushing ideas” shaped by her clients’ love of travel, literature, and entertaining.
The resulting interiors unfold as a sequence of immersive environments, each calibrated with its own mood, palette and narrative. “The layout of Botanical House was more about excitement and wonder as each different room revealed themselves,” explains Fanning. Dark steel-framed doors act as thresholds between spaces, framing what Fanning describes as “literal windows into the next scene.”
Walk Through The Home By Mim Design
While original details including moldings, mantels, and traditional windows were carefully restored within the formal rooms, newer interventions embrace a more cinematic sensibility. Fanning conceptualized the house as having “its own passport,” with interiors drawing references from “Parisian entryways, hidden Italian wine bars, London’s prosperous Hyde Park and the neighboring Botanical Gardens.”
Colour was leveraged as a defining architectural device. Ombre-painted ceilings—a first for the studio—wash the study and salon in graduated tones, while botanical wallpaper and deep green ceilings reference the lush landscape beyond. Elsewhere, Murano glass chandeliers, vivid stone surfaces and integrated lacquered joinery heighten the sense of immersion.
Despite its layered exuberance, the house remains deeply personal. “The rooms now deliberately function to both reawaken the clients’ love for entertaining whilst providing private quarters for recession from revelry,” adds Fanning. The result is a richly atmospheric home where memory, narrative, and domestic life intersect.
Source: https://interiordesign.net