Every now and then a home walks across our desk that we know is going to be a beauty after we strip it back, and the Hamilton Hill brick veneer was one of them. When Mick first stood out the front with the homeowner — coffee in one hand, tape measure in the other — the place was stuck in 1978. Crazy paving. Brown roof tiles. A patchy front lawn that had been mown more in hope than effort. But the bones? The bones were honest. That’s the kind of house we love getting our hands on.
The brief: keep the bones, lose the eighties
The owners had been in the home for nine years. Two kids, a kelpie, a vegie patch out the back that had finally hit its straps. They didn’t want to move — they liked the street, they liked the school catchment, they liked their neighbours. They wanted the house to catch up.
What they came to us with was a wishlist on the back of a Bunnings receipt: a Hamptons-leaning facade, a kitchen that didn’t trap whoever was cooking, a master bedroom that felt grown-up, and an outdoor area that worked through a Melbourne winter as well as a 38-degree February afternoon. Sienna, our designer, sat down with them for a long Saturday morning and turned that wishlist into a mood board, and then a plan.
What we found when we opened the walls
Anyone who has renovated a brick veneer from the seventies will tell you: you don’t really know what you’ve bought until you start cutting. We found three things that needed sorting before we could even think about the cosmetic stuff.
- Old wiring. Two-core, no earth, on circuits that had been added to over the decades like a family Christmas tree. We pulled it all out and started fresh.
- No sarking under the roof. In summer the place was an oven; in winter it bled heat through the ceiling. We added a reflective sarking layer and bumped the ceiling batts up to R6.
- A laundry waste pipe that had been gently disconnecting itself. For about a decade, by the look of it. We won’t dwell on what was under the floorboards.
None of this was on the original quote — and that’s the conversation our team has at the start of every job. Old houses surprise you. We’d rather walk through the surprises with the owners over a cup of tea than try to hide them and have a fight at hand-over.
The facade: from brown box to coastal classic
The biggest visual change was out the front, and it cost us less than the kitchen. We rendered the brickwork in a soft off-white, replaced the brown tin roof with a charcoal Colorbond Surfmist, and added timber-look battens above the new front porch. Sienna chose Dulux Whisper White for the render, Lexicon Quarter for the trims, and a deep Domino front door that, frankly, made the whole street stop and look on the day Jordan rolled the second coat on.
We reframed the front portico with hardwood posts, swapped the aluminium-framed living room window for a black powder-coated double-hung that nods to the Hamptons style without screaming it, and laid a bluestone pathway that was sourced from a Castlemaine quarry less than two hours from the site. Local materials matter to us, and they matter to clients who care where their renovation comes from.
The kitchen: from pinch-point to gathering point
The original kitchen had been built when the average family ate together at a table and the cook stayed out of sight. Times have changed. We pulled the wall between the kitchen and the dining room down (after Dave checked it wasn’t load-bearing — it wasn’t, but the one between the dining and the lounge was, so we threw a steel beam in and left that opening squared off) and reorganised the entire space around a four-metre island bench in honed Caesarstone.
Things we’re particularly proud of in this kitchen:
- Shaker-profile cabinetry in two-pack polyurethane, not vinyl-wrap. Vinyl wrap looks great until the dishwasher steam gets to it. We’ve replaced too many to recommend it.
- A 900mm Smeg freestanding cooker — Australian-supported, parts available everywhere.
- A scullery off the back of the main bench that hides the toaster, the kettle, and the inevitable kids’ lunchbox station.
- Brass tapware from a Melbourne supplier we’ve used on more than a dozen jobs. It patinas beautifully and the warranty is honest.
The master suite: a quiet win
The original master was 3.4 by 3.6 metres with a sliding wardrobe that had warped in the eighties and never been straightened. We pushed the back wall out 1.8 metres into what used to be a tacked-on sunroom, fitted a walk-in robe with built-in drawers, and turned the original ensuite into a proper bathroom with a freestanding bath, a 1500mm walk-in shower, and a vanity that the owners can both stand at without elbowing each other at 7am.
Brett, who quoted the job, will tell you the master suite was the part of the budget that came in tightest — bathrooms always do. We made it work by keeping the existing plumbing rough-ins exactly where they were, and by doing the tiling ourselves with our regular tiling crew rather than subbing it out to whoever the supply yard recommended.
Outdoors: a deck for nine months of the year
The original “outdoor area” was a 3-by-3 concrete pad with a clothesline. We built a 36-square-metre Spotted Gum deck, dropped a steel-framed pergola over the top with a louvered roof from a Geelong supplier, and ran power and a ceiling fan out so the family could actually use it from October through to May. The deck connects directly to the new kitchen via a stacker door — three panels, top-hung, so the screen runs flush with the architrave when it’s open.
We plumbed in a gas point for a barbecue, ran cold water out for the dog wash, and put a small bench seat with hidden storage along the back wall for cushions and the odd cricket bat. None of this is glamorous. All of it is the kind of stuff our team thinks about because we’ve lived in Australian houses ourselves.
What it cost — and what it added
The full scope, including the front facade, the kitchen, the master suite, the deck, the wiring rework, and the insulation upgrade, came in at the upper end of the original quote — about six per cent over, all of which was the unforeseen wiring and the laundry waste pipe. We don’t budget for surprises, but we always set aside a contingency conversation, and we had it early.
The local agent the owners had a chat to before the build estimated their place would have sold in the original condition for somewhere around the suburb median. Six months after we handed back the keys, a similar but less-renovated home two streets over went under the hammer for nearly $180,000 above that median. That’s not a guarantee — every market is its own animal — but it’s a sensible gauge.
What we’d do differently
Two things, in the spirit of the honest case study.
First, we’d have lifted the entire roof line by 200mm at the planning stage rather than trying to integrate the new portico with the original eave. The portico looks great — but the join took us a week longer than it should have, because the original roof was set just a touch lower than is comfortable to work under. Lesson learnt: if a facade change is borderline, raise the roof.
Second, we’d have repainted the garage internally at the same time. The owners didn’t ask for it, we didn’t suggest it, and now the garage looks like the only room that didn’t get the memo. If you’re renovating, do the garage. It costs $800 and a Saturday and it changes the way the place feels every time you come home.
If you’re sitting on a tired brick veneer
You don’t have to knock it down. You don’t have to sell. The Hamilton Hill home was a perfectly serviceable brick box for fifty years, and it’ll be a perfectly beautiful family home for the next fifty. The bones were good. We just gave them a haircut, a clean shirt, and a reason to stand up straight.
If your place is in the same neighbourhood — figuratively or literally — and you’re wondering whether it’s worth renovating or starting over, get in touch. Mick or Dave will come out, walk the place with you, and tell you straight whether we think it’s a renovation, a knockdown rebuild, or just a paint job and a new front door. Sometimes that’s all a house needs.
The team behind the build
Every job we run has the same five-person nucleus, even though the trades around them rotate based on the work. Mick is our director and lead builder — twenty-eight years on the tools, started in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, and still picks up his own thermos at five-thirty in the morning. Dave runs the project plan and the day-to-day site supervision; he’s the one fielding the homeowner’s text messages on a Sunday afternoon when they spot something. Sienna is our designer — she came to us from a Sydney interiors studio and has the rare combination of taste and a calculator. Brett is the estimator and quantity surveyor; if a budget walks out the door, it walks past him first. And Jordan is our third-year apprentice, who is everywhere, eats everything, and will be running his own jobs by the time we finish writing this.
It matters who builds your house. Renovations are not anonymous transactions — they’re months of having someone in your home, around your kids, and inside the budget that took you years to save. The Hamilton Hill family had Dave at their kitchen table on a Saturday morning before they’d signed anything, and they had Mick on the phone at 7am the day the bobcat arrived. That’s not a marketing line. That’s how we run.