How Chiaroscuro lights the way in this Melbourne Home by Gillian Serisier for Australian Design Review.
[Extract] In a project that is fused with light that seems to pour into the home from all angles, the combined elements of architecture and interior design coalesce with beautiful intimacy, writes Inside co-editor Gillian Serisier.
With a design strategy to play with ideas of chiaroscuro, the play is just that. Rather than pose contrasts of shadow and light, the contrast is derived through black detailing and a super abundance of light. It is a small but neat distinction, as it allows all space to be fully and beautifully realised.
The main living area is a large oblong with floor-to-ceiling glass on both sides, north and south.
Here, light fills the space constantly with no need for artificial lighting until well into the early evening. A polished cement floor gives subtle reflections, while the fine linen drapes in pale grey with a black fleck give vertical shadows. The room itself reads as a series of broad horizontal strokes of grey and black, in stone, timber, lounge and cabinetry.
The last of these horizontals is further broken at a lower level with a textural interplay of rug (Halcyon Lake), stone detail (Stonemason MCM Tile and Stone), and the introduction of a circular form via the low black timber coffee table. And while the dining table (Prostoria) and cabinetry (AD Cabinets) are black at each end, the effect of the light renders angles within the surface as slightly reflective and shape defining for being so.
The black slats of the full end-wall of cabinetry, for example, changes in the way it is read as diurnal shifts transpose the dense black to a shimmering screen of vertical slats broken only by the surface distinctions of the also black television and fireplace.
