CREATIVE WISDOM

A love of colour and an eye for detail saw this homeowner and interior designer forge a charming family home from a Federation property in Sydney's inner west.

-  Vanessa Walker

When it comes to choosing a home, location, age and condition are usually the determining factors. Yet for Jacqui Senior, interior designer and director of Studio Senior, there was a fourth element at play. The magic confluence of events we call serendipity.

Having grown up in the village-like surrounds of Sydney's inner west, Jacqui was on the lookout for a forever home in the area where she could raise her two daughters, Margot, five, and toddler, Greta. "It's close to my family, has great schools and it's easy to get into the city or anywhere in Sydney," she says. "It's also full of parks and playgrounds."

When this circa-1910 two-bedroom home came on the market, she could see it had great bones and room for improvements that aligned with her talents as an interior designer. She also had an enduring connection to the home: her grandparents had once lived there.

No historical house is without problems; although for Jacqui there were aspects that made her planned renovation easier. "The house is freestanding with a generous width to it," she says. "And the old part of the house still had many original features, which was great." Fortuitously, it also had a rear extension that, although badly executed, meant she didn't have to start from scratch with an addition. Instead, she could focus on remodelling, adding windows and doors and introducing more light.

The family lived in the home for three years while Jacqui planned a transformation that brought in sun, colour and joy. She went about redesigning the home and was ready to set to work in October 2021. But life also likes to throw in a few curveballs. A six-month rebuild, timed for completion before the birth of her second daughter, was first hit by a rainy summer that created a minor flood, which meant redoing the damp-proofing. Then, when the sun appeared, so did the Covid pandemic, adding three months to the project.