Photography: Jennet Markham
Walk through many new houses in Brisbane, and you can still see the Queenslander in outline: the pitched roof, the timber battens, and sometimes a nod to a verandah. What has quietly disappeared is the logic that made the original work, and that omission has been a mistake. Contemporary life does ask more of a house: larger kitchens, more bathrooms, greater privacy, integrated technology, and environmental control the original house was never designed to provide. But those requirements explain new fittings, not the disappearance of an entire way of thinking about climate.
The more interesting lessons here are architectural rather than stylistic. A traditional Queensland house rarely moved abruptly from an enclosed interior to an exposed landscape: there were verandas, under crofts, breezeways and deep eaves. The building created degrees of enclosure, letting the experience of changing weather unfold gradually as you moved through it, an idea that feels particularly relevant in Brisbane. Contemporary houses often make that relationship far more binary: a wall of glass separates an air-conditioned interior from a terrace. While there is nothing wrong with that solution, it can reduce a rich architectural relationship to a piece of operable glazing.
The older Brisbane house understood the value of the space in between. A shaded threshold gives the eye time to adjust to bright daylight, protects an opening from rain, and creates a place to sit that is neither fully inside nor fully outside. Above all, it changes the experience of moving through the house, room by room, rather than presenting it all at once.
This does not mean reproducing the Queenslander. Architecture becomes nostalgic when it copies the appearance of an earlier solution without understanding what produced it; fretwork and a pitched roof do not make a house responsive to Brisbane's climate. The useful question is what the older architecture knew: that shade matters, that air needs somewhere to move, and that protection from the weather does not always require complete enclosure. Those principles can yield very different architecture today. A deep concrete overhang can do some of the work once done by a veranda, a planted courtyard can create a protected transition, and screens can filter sun and visibility. None needs to look remotely historical.
A house I worked on in Bulimba made this clear. The original plan placed a wall of glass along the western elevation, opening the living room directly onto the pool terrace, precisely the binary threshold the older houses avoided. Brisbane's afternoon sun would have made that wall unusable on most days, with the blinds permanently down. Rather than reduce the glazing, we introduced a deep, covered breezeway between the room and the terrace, screened on its western face and open to cross-ventilation. The room kept its connection to the garden, the harsh light never reached it, and the breezeway became the place where the family gathered in the evenings.
For an interior designer, these architectural decisions matter because they determine how rooms behave. Where does furniture naturally face? Does a room receive harsh reflected light from a terrace, or filtered light from a protected edge? These questions arise before decoration. Brisbane offers us the chance to make houses unusually connected to their surroundings, but connection is not achieved simply by making openings larger; sometimes architecture becomes more responsive by adding something between the room and the landscape rather than removing everything in between. The Queenslander understood this well. We do not need to reproduce it, but we would be unwise to forget what it knew.
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.