The most challenging design test for an Interior Designer is designing for yourself.
When you spend your career translating other people’s dreams into beautiful, functional spaces, you develop an almost instinctive fluency for the brief. You ask the right questions. You listen between the lines. You know how to balance aspiration with practicality, personality with timelessness.
Then you build your own home and have to do it all for yourself.
For Humphrey Homes’ own interior designer, this was the most creatively challenging project of her career – a home she was designing not just as a member of the team, but for herself. Here’s why, and how the architecture led her to the answer.
The Paralysis of Infinite Choice
Every designer knows the feeling. When the client is yourself, the brief is both completely clear and impossibly open-ended.
There’s no one to present to. No mood board to seek approval on. No scope to define. The professional instinct to refine, edit and second-guess goes into overdrive because every decision is personal, permanent and entirely your own.
“Designing for clients gives you a framework,” she explains. “Designing for yourself removes it entirely.”
The first challenge wasn’t aesthetic. It was psychological – learning to trust her own instincts the way she trusts them for everyone else.
Finding the Brief in the Building
Clarity came through collaboration with Humphrey Homes’ in-house Architect, Helen Marchesani.
South Perth has a rich architectural heritage and is home to some of Perth’s finest examples of Art Moderne. This distinctly glamorous interwar style swept through Australia in the 1930s and 40s, leaving behind curved facades, horizontal banding, porthole windows and a legacy of timeless architectural language.
The iconic Cygnet Cinema is classic example of Art Moderne. It was the starting off point for both the architecture and the interiors.
The house wouldn’t just sit in South Perth. It would belong to it.
Why Art Moderne Still Works
Art Moderne (or Streamline Moderne) emerged as a more restrained evolution of Art Deco. Where Deco was ornate and vertically dramatic, Moderne was smooth, horizontal and more resolved – built for a world that was moving faster and had less patience for fuss.
Its design principles are almost tailor-made for contemporary living:
• Clean horizontal lines that make spaces feel calm and grounded
• Curved walls and arches that soften spaces without sacrificing structure
• A blurring of indoors and out through large openings and continuous material palettes
• A focus on material integrity over decoration.
Decades later, these ideas still hold.
Art Moderne was the starting point for the moodboard
The Materials: Where the Vision Became Tactile
Choosing an architectural language is one thing. Translating it into materials is where a designer’s real skill shows. And where this project quietly dazzles.
Marble
Marble was the prestige material of the Moderne era, and it earns its place here for the same reason it always has: no manufactured surface replicates its depth, its coolness, or the way light moves across its veining. Selected for its tonal restraint, the marble used throughout this residence reads as quietly luxurious.
Black Steel-Framed Windows
Nothing references the Moderne period more precisely than steel-framed windows. The black steel frames create a graphic linearity that echoes the era’s love of horizontal banding. They are at once period-correct and thoroughly modern.
Tessellated Tiles in the Entry
The entrance hall sets the tone and here, tessellated tiles do it with the confidence of a century of precedent behind them. Geometric and precise, they are a direct reference to the decorative language of the interwar period.
What Designing Your Own Home Teaches
What this residence demonstrates is that the strongest design briefs are often contextual rather than personal. The suburb, its heritage, its architectural precedents – these are not constraints. They are the starting point.
Art Moderne gave this designer permission to stop deliberating and start deciding. The materials gave the vision weight.
The result is a home that doesn’t mimic the period. It continues it.
To see how it all came together, visit our Projects page.