URBAN RENEWAL

A sweet worker's cottage survives heritage listings and a round of DA roulette to emerge a dream family home for a landscape designer.

- STORY Eliza O'Hare | STYLING Holly Irvine | PHOTOGRAPHY Jason Busch

The way our gardens and outdoor spaces interact with the interiors of our homes is such a big part of Australian style and the way we live. So it’s always interesting to see how a landscape designer - who is so steeped in planning green spaces, outdoor areas and experiential backyards - approaches the renovation of their own home.

For Mark Bell, a dedicated lifelong garden guy and award-winning landscape designer, his love of landscapes is only matched by his love of design. “I've always had a huge passion for architecture,” he says. “When I started landscaping nearly 30 years ago, I loved working on these beautifully designed homes. I found it a real inspiration and it would always guide the landscape.”

Although they had planned their dream home on paper for years, Mark and his wife, Vanessa, had to lock down the right house for transformation. Their criteria was strict, which was probably why the search took two years. For anyone who grew up seaside with saltwater in their ears on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, like Mark, or any other surf-devoted coastal community, they would know that for children of the beach, proximity to water is a nonnegotiable. But looking for a house in Sydney's Inner-West meant that even though the local cottages were drop-dead charming, it posed a tedious trek through the city back to the beaches for their dose of water. “I was like, ‘Okay, I will stay in Balmain, but we have to have a pool’.” That set the first criteria - a house with space for a pool. It also had to be north-facing, on a level block over 200sqm and the building had to have potential to renovate. What they found was a three-bedroom freestanding worker’s cottage with a cluster of soaring eucalyptus on a neighbouring property, which suggested bushland, in a secluded, quiet street - the last of the Balmain unicorns.