A compact inner-city apartment proving that confident design thinking matters more than square metres.

Project Snapshot

Lygon Street Residence is a fully completed interior refresh of a 48sqm apartment in Brunswick East. Originally finished in the late 1990s, the home was transformed through a restrained architectural palette, selective retention of existing elements and a bold approach to furniture and art, delivering a refined and character-filled interior within a tightly controlled budget.

Client Brief

The brief was to refresh the apartment without erasing what already worked. With a limited budget and a compact footprint, the focus was on making smart decisions rather than wholesale replacement. The goal was to create a home that felt confident, generous and design-led, appealing to first-home buyers and investors alike, while avoiding the blandness often associated with small apartments.

Design Story

Rather than fighting the apartment’s modest size, the design leans into it. The existing layout, generous by late-1990s apartment standards, was retained, allowing attention to be placed on materiality, light and atmosphere rather than unnecessary structural change.

A largely monochromatic palette was established across the main living spaces, kitchen and bathroom, anchored in Lexicon Quarter. This restrained base immediately freshened and opened up the apartment, creating visual continuity and a calm architectural backdrop. Against the restrained architectural backdrop, colour and personality were introduced through furniture, lighting and decorative pieces by Jonathan Adler and Tom Dixon, with contemporary artwork by Still & All adding scale and visual confidence.

Several original elements were deliberately retained and reinterpreted. Existing stone benchtops and distinctive purple cabinetry were kept and coupled with newly wrapped high-gloss white joinery, transforming them from dated to intentional. Rare for an apartment of this era, the original hardwood flooring was refinished rather than replaced, grounding the interior and adding a sense of permanence.

In contrast to the lighter shared spaces, darker and moodier tones were introduced in the bedroom and euro laundry. This shift in palette creates a sense of luxury and clearly defines zones within the compact footprint, allowing each space to feel purposeful rather than compressed.

Large-format Waterfall Grey Flow tiles by Signorino were used throughout the wet areas, with chevron splashbacks adding texture and movement without visual clutter. Lighting was treated as a design tool rather than a utility. With strong natural light during the day, evening lighting was designed to create atmosphere, using targeted cigar spots to highlight artwork and architectural moments. A large-scale artwork occupying nearly an entire wall reinforces this approach, demonstrating that the same design principles often reserved for larger homes can be applied here to create confidence and visual generosity.