The Gold Coast Pink House | Grand Designs Australia
If you've found this because you watched the episode, hello. People have been asking me about that house for years and I've never written the whole thing down.
Television is very good at showing you a before and an after. It is less good at the eighteen months in between, where the interesting part lives, the decisions, the things that went wrong, and the slightly mad process of choosing four hundred finishes from a single slab of stone.
So here's the long version. Apparently, it's the one people actually want.
What it was before
Three storeys, neglected, and by most reasonable measures a bad idea.
There was mould. Cracked tiles. Every room had a different flooring, or none at all. The front door was falling off its hinges. There were trees growing through the shed in the backyard, not near it, through it.
Several people told me not to buy it. They weren't being unkind; they were being accurate about what they could see. What I could see was a three-storey house with the Gold Coast skyline out of the top floor and nothing structurally wrong that money and eighteen months wouldn't fix.
I bought it anyway.
It all came from one slab of rose quartz!
People assume the pink came first. It didn't. The pink came out of a real semi-precious gem stone (a rock).
I found a slab of rose quartz in a stoneyard, I was obsessed! It wasn't pink in the way people mean when they say pink, it was a soft blush with veins of warm gold running through it and a white that wasn't quite white. And it sparkled in the sunlight. Three colours, sitting there, already decided.
That slab became the kitchen bench, and everything else in the house answered to it.
This is the part I'd want anyone renovating to take from this: I never chose a colour scheme. I drew inspiration that lead the direction. I chose one object I loved, read what was already in it, and spent the next eighteen months asking every subsequent decision whether it agreed. Does this tapware sit with the gold, or fight it? Does this white go blue against that white? Is this timber warm enough to hold its own next to the stone?
It sounds restrictive. It's the opposite. Once the palette is set by something real, you stop having opinions and start having answers, and four hundred subsequent decisions had guidelines and become almost fast.
Finding the pink
Getting a pink right on a wall is much harder than it sounds, and the reason is light.
Pink is one of the least forgiving colours there is. And it wasn't used everywhere, but where it was used, it had to be the perfect shade of pink! Half a step too cool and it goes lilac by four in the afternoon. Half a step too warm and it reads peach in the morning and dirty by evening. And because it was going on a lot of wall across three storeys facing four different directions, a colour that worked in one room could be a disaster in another.
So I tested. Then I tested more. At one point the wall looked like a fault had developed, dozens of hand-painted squares, unlabelled, in shades nobody but me could tell apart.
I looked at them in the morning, at three in the afternoon, and at night with the lights on. Three in the afternoon is the one that matters, it's when most whites go grey and most warm colours go yellow. If a colour survives 3pm, it will survive everything.
It was not an elegant process and there was nothing intuitive about it. It was just the only way to be certain, and certainty is worth a lot when the alternative is repainting a three-storey house.
I lived and breathed this reno, it was life! I chose every finish myself, and managed every trade on site..
Every tile. Every tap. Every handle, every paint colour, every light fitting, every length of skirting. Not selected from a supplier's package or signed off on someone else's board, chosen one at a time, against that slab.
I also project managed it. Every trade on that site was booked, scheduled, chased and paid by me, in an order I worked out myself (sometimes chaotic, but this ADHD brain of mine does seem to survive on chaos), while my family of 5 lived on the third floor (consisting of only a bedroom, wardrobe and bathroom) and the two floors underneath us were gutted. The kids were along for the adventure and embraced every moment of it!
I physically helped with the demolition, its actually therapeutic if you've got some anger to get out (yes these same manicured hands that touch your face and apply makeup get gloves on and physically get to work). I did the painting (it's like giving a giant spray tan). I have opinions about micro cement that I did not have when I started.
I'm saying this plainly because it's the part that gets flattened on television, and it's also the reason I now do this for other people. The eye is one thing. Knowing that a custom ordered vanity can have a twelve-week lead time and will hold up a trade you've already booked is a different thing entirely, and you only learn it by getting it wrong on your own house. It's also absolute chaos (that is not for the faint hearted) trying to do this if you have another job / life to manage.
The bathroom that took seven months
I'd planned a month for the micro cement.
It took seven. Cracks appeared, were filled, were sealed, and appeared again somewhere else. Then the same thing the following month. Trades learning on a job they were 'experienced' in. Patience because you can appreciate they are genuinely trying, but frustration because it is your timeline at the end of the day. There is no dramatic story in it, no disaster, no flood, nothing you could film. Just the slow grind of a finish that would not behave, in a room that everything else was waiting on.
That's the honest texture of renovating and it is almost never what gets shown. The genuinely hard parts aren't the catastrophes. They're the small things that quietly take six times longer than they should while you're paying for the privilege.
The engineers were the other one. I had a plan that involved removing certain walls, and engineering said no, and the design had to change around a structural reality I couldn't argue with.
Nothing about it went to plan. I don't know a renovation that does.
What I was actually trying to make
Not a pink house. That's what it got called, and I don't mind, but it isn't what I was doing.
I was trying to make somewhere that felt like being on holiday when you were home. Somewhere calm. Somewhere people gravitate to connect (my kids and their friends in mind). Somewhere calm that sparks creativity. The kind of house you exhale in when you walk through the door, rather than one you admire from the doorway.
It borrowed from a few places, the Mediterranean, Palm Springs, and the Australian coast, which sounds like an odd combination until you notice that all three are really about light and ease rather than a particular look.
That's the whole thing, really. A room isn't a colour and it isn't a style. It's a feeling you're trying to produce in someone, and every material choice either adds to that feeling or takes away from it. It's the same job I do on a wedding morning. Different medium, identical question.
Where everything came from
Exterior paint is Dulux, bought through Inspirations Paint, Natural White for the Exterior, 1/2 Strength Natural White inside for a lighter, airier feel, and Dune on the roof, a Colorbond colour that Dulux colour-matched into roof paint.
Kitchen cabinetry is IKEA. Brass hardware from Passion Interiors. Lighting from About Space.
The bathroom vanities were custom made and sourced through The Blue Space, mirrors from Future Glass, and the tiles came from Jatana Interiors, Tile Cloud and National Tiles. Tapware is ABI.
The lounge is Nick Scali, the rug is Miss Amara, and the TV unit is IKEA with a Bunnings benchtop. The stair runner and entry rug were custom made by James Leon.
And my makeup and hair chair, which gets more questions than anything else in the house (as it comes to every wedding with me and sets a vibe), is Business & Pleasure.
What happened to it
Grand Designs Australia filmed it, and it went to air on the ABC. Grand Designs Magazine ran it. When it eventually listed, it was one of the Gold Coast's most-viewed homes of the week on realestate.com.au. For a while it was being used as a photoshoot & filming location by a few well-known Australian brands, which was not something I planned but it led me to meet many cool people along that journey, some who I continue to enjoy working with.
The part I liked best was smaller than any of that. Several neighbours stopped me to say thank you, not for the house, but for what they could now see out of their own windows instead of a derelict one.
And then it wasn't ours
It was finished, it was on television, and it was called a forever home more than once, including by me.
It turned out not to be. Watching the episode back afterwards, knowing that, was its own particular thing.
I'm not going to write about that here. But I'd rather say it plainly than let the version with the music over it stand as the whole story, because a lot of people watch those programmes and quietly assume everyone else's life resolves the way a finished house does.
What I took out of it isn't the house. It's the eye, and the eighteen months of learning exactly how a build goes together, and knowing what a bad idea looks like before it costs somebody forty thousand dollars.
The house didn't stay. That did.
What I do with it now
I choose colour and finishes for other people's houses, which is the job the pink house trained me for whether or not I knew it at the time.
The Creative Concept Blueprint (CLICK HERE) is what I wish I'd had: a complete direction for one room, with a full finishes schedule your builder can actually price and work from, sourcing links for everything, and the reasoning behind each decision. Available online, anywhere, worldwide. So if you are designing a home on the Gold Coast of Australia or in Palm Beach in Florida USA, let this Aussie gal help you!
And if you're doing it yourself and just want the framework, the selections schedule, the budget tracker, the vision board, that's in the shop (HERE)
Start with one object you love. Everything after that is easier than it looks.
Others who have featured my home & design work online:
Grand Designs Magazine ran it granddesignsmag.com.au/tv-homes/gold-coast-pink-house
"most-viewed homes of the week" on realestate.com.au the realestate.com.au article
Grand Designs Australia, ABC
