Urban Courtyard 2 When landscape designer Rick Eckersley first saw the tiny backyard of this Melbourne home, he was confronted by two small patches of badly drained, half dead lawn. Undeterred, Rick set to work on his design, aiming to create an extension of indoor...
House Facelift The subject of our makeover was a red brick house with a very unattractive front garden, steps and balcony. Don thought the red bricks were very relentless, but decided he could work around them. However the colour of the trim on the woodwork, railings...
Window Cleaning Of all the irksome household chores, cleaning windows has to be right up there with the ironing. Commercial cleaners, soap and water, newspaper and other methods all work reasonably well, but there has to be a better way! Peter Valder recommends the...
Sydney graphic designer Elly Clark lives in a red brick block of flats with a rounded Art Deco influence. The building itself presents an interesting challenge, but Elly was really stumped when it came to her tiny, useless balcony. What could be done to make it look...
Cooking food outdoors on the barbecue is a great Aussie tradition, and nothing sums up the laid back, unpretentious nature of Australia better than the backyard barbie. Or does it? In recent years barbecues have moved upmarket and are now competing with the family car...
Don demonstrated how to transform a large courtyard into a stylish entertaining area using blue metal dust, an inexpensive but very classy looking material. A site analysis revealed several problems which needed to be addressed during the makeover: the white buildings...
In the winter when the garden is looking drab, camellias come to the rescue with their beautiful flowers and glossy green foliage. It’s natural to want to bring them inside and use them in flower arrangements, but the problem is they have very short stems and...
Cliffhanger House Imagine how hard it would be to build a house on a very steep site. Don visited an amazing cliffside house and chatted to the owners about some of the challenges they faced. As well as the difficult situation, they also had to cope with a partial...
Colour Combinations There’s no such thing as a bad colour but there are some bad colour combinations. Tracy Marsh shared a few tips and basic rules on using colour to decorate in your home. Simply stick to one colour theme; reds (pale pink through to crimson),...
Courtyard The owners of a newly renovated Melbourne house called in landscape designer Jim Fogarty to transform their garden into a modern, contemporary courtyard. This posed a few problems, because the area was only about 6x6m (20×20′), the side fences...