Photography: Richard Waite
Ask what a luxury client wants, and most people picture the same thing: a formal room, kept for special occasions, furnished to impress rather than to live in. That image describes very few of the clients I design for in Brisbane. Most want a beautiful home they can walk into straight from the pool. That contradiction, between real refinement and a way of living that rarely switches off, is closer to what the work asks for than any mood board.
My clients in Brisbane have typically spent real time in London, Paris, Singapore and New York, and that experience raises their expectations of craft, materials and finish. However, it does very little to raise their expectations of formality. They want a house built to the same standard as anything they have seen abroad, but one they can still live in exactly as they already do, unhurried and rarely dressed for the room.
That way of living tends to be more informal than clients expect to admit at the first meeting. Doors stay open more than they are closed. Children and adults use the same rooms rather than being kept in separate ones. A pool is rarely a feature to be viewed from indoors; it is somewhere people actually spend the afternoon, in and out of the house, without much ceremony. Furniture must survive a wet swimsuit as often as a dinner party.
The climate shapes the day in ways a project rarely states outright. Mornings and evenings draw people outside; the middle of a hot day pushes them back in, often into a room they expect to feel properly cool rather than merely air-conditioned. A house that assumes one mode of living all day, formal in the morning and the same at midnight, misunderstands how a Brisbane household moves through its rooms.
Family patterns show up here in a particular Brisbane way, too. The river runs through almost every version of daily life that matters to a client here: a walk or a run along it most mornings, children who learn to paddle before they learn to drive, and a deck built specifically to watch the light change on the water at the end of the day. A house that ignores that relationship, however well it performs indoors, has misread what the family organises its week around.
None of this argues against luxury; it argues for a different definition of it: rooms that are formal enough to hold their own at a formal dinner and relaxed enough that nobody thinks twice about arriving barefoot. Getting both from the same room, rather than choosing between them, is what a Brisbane client actually asks of an interior designer, whatever the mood board might suggest.
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.