All in the FAMILY

Indoors and outdoors meld into one in a stylish weekender on the NSW South Coast, shaped by two landscaping professionals who also happen to be brothers.

-  Chris Pearson

Childhood surfing holidays spent with their father on the NSW South Coast were fresh in their memories when brothers Luke and Jay Baldwin bought this four-bedroom 1950s bungalow in 2018. Two hours’ drive from Sydney, it would be the ideal weekender and getaway from their busy working lives.

However, for these professional green thumbs – Luke is a landscape architect and Jay is a landscape construction manager, at Formed Gardens – their design flair never goes on holiday, as this home reveals. That sense of style extends both inside and out, the two melding into a seamless whole.

When they first sighted the cottage, it was a humble fibro, tellingly described by the real-estate ads as a “DIY delight”. The house was the victim of a renovation abandoned midway by the previous owners, who had opened up its rear and added a deck with laundry attached. The interiors were painted a sterile hospital green, too.

“Jay and I had renovated several homes together and were looking for a new project,” says Luke. “Armed with the knowledge of what we had done before, we could see the potential. We wanted to create a space to suit our lifestyle, a home away from home, where we could surf and catch up with friends and family, with plenty of room for them to stay and hang out in the garden or beside the pool.”

Luke and Jay reclad the exterior in fibre-cement boards, replaced the tiled roof with Colorbond, moved the laundry to the middle of the house and added a second, large family bathroom beside it. The reworked rear deck now sports a bar, connected to the open-plan area by bi-folds, while the garage has morphed into a games room. Otherwise, the floor plan remains unchanged.