Photography: Jennet Markham
Heritage is sometimes framed as a choice between preservation and progress. In Brisbane, that tension is visible: the city has an extraordinary inheritance of timber houses, verandahs and decorative joinery, much of it on sites where contemporary life now demands more of a house than its original plan was intended to provide. That gap is where most renovation mistakes begin. The real challenge is changing a house without removing the qualities that made it worth preserving.
Heritage controls inevitably form part of that conversation, and restrictions on demolition, alterations and significant elements need to be understood at the outset, with the right advice. But complying with the rules is only the beginning; a renovation can satisfy every formal requirement and still misunderstand the house. One common mistake is treating the original building as an inconvenience: rooms are opened indiscriminately, walls are removed, and the back is replaced with as much glass as possible, on the assumption that an older plan represents restriction and openness represents improvement. Sometimes that is transformative. Sometimes it simply removes all the rooms.
There is value in enclosure: a doorway creates a threshold, a sequence of spaces gives a house rhythm, and a smaller room can offer an intimacy no open plan allows, a distinction difficult to recover once every space has been connected to every other. A related mistake is confusing heritage with imitation, either reproducing original details so faithfully that old and new become indistinguishable or swinging to the opposite extreme until an addition feels confrontational. New work can be clearly of its time while remaining sympathetic to what was already there, and the conversation is often more interesting when both remain legible.
The same principle applies inside. Keeping a traditional exterior does not require furnishing the interior as a period reconstruction, any more than modernising it requires stripping away every trace of age. An old timber door beside contemporary furniture can make both more interesting, and an antique can give a room a sense of history no reproduction could manufacture. The difficulty is knowing what deserves to remain, since not everything old is inherently valuable simply for being old.
Good renovation requires discrimination rather than nostalgia: what is significant, what merely exists, and what can actually be repaired? Often, what matters is not the object itself but the relationship it created. A veranda may matter for the shade and transition it provides rather than for every piece of its fabric; a hallway may deserve to remain simply because it establishes the sequence of arrival, even after its finishes have changed. Understanding that distinction creates much more freedom.
A further mistake occurs when all the attention goes to the architecture and too little to the life that will occupy it. A beautifully restored room can still be difficult to furnish, with limited wall space or a fireplace competing for the same corner. These are reasons to design around the heritage elements more intelligently, not to remove them: a sofa may need a particular dimension because the room will not accommodate a standard one, or joinery can be built around an existing opening rather than forcing the opening to move.
Constraints produce real specificity, one of the things I find particularly compelling about older buildings: an inherited condition forces a response a blank room never demands. These houses also carry climate lessons worth understanding, even where the solution is not reproduced, something I have written about elsewhere. One persistent mistake is assuming modernisation requires erasing every inconvenience, yet an old house can work beautifully without behaving exactly like a new one.
In the end, a well-renovated Brisbane house is neither frozen at some idealised moment nor reduced to an old façade concealing an unrelated house behind it; the more interesting renovation lets the original building remain intelligible while quietly giving it another life. Heritage rules tell us what we are permitted to change. Good design has to decide what we should.
Daniel Kostiuc Interior Design is a luxury interior design studio based in Brisbane, offering residential interior design and interior decoration across Queensland, Australia and internationally. Services include new builds, renovations and complete furnishing projects, with space planning, custom joinery, bespoke furniture, furniture selection, lighting, art and accessories for high-end homes.