From a bungalow to a huge four-level house with a show-stopping staircase, designed for Sydney’s indoor-outdoor lifestyle
- A former Hongkonger relocated her large family to Sydney, Australia, and transformed a bungalow into a 6,000 sq ft, four-level, art-filled home
- Architect Luigi Rosselli married old and new harmoniously, using the staircase to add a twist of high drama to a house that serves in many different ways
It is not hard to see why a spectral sculpture stopped Philippa Haydon dead in her tracks when it beckoned, from the window of a studio gallery, several years ago.
Not only are its diaphanous billows and drapes captivating, the illuminated acrylic work also seems to respond sympathetically to the show-stopping sinuous staircase that ripples through the four levels of her 6,000-square-foot (560-square-metre), art-filled, seven-bedroom Sydney house.
“I was driving past and was immediately taken by its sculptural form and curves,” says Haydon. “I literally bought it on the spot.”
Its name added a playful punch. The part-light, part-art piece is dubbed Gweilo, that tongue-in-cheek Cantonese epithet meaning foreigner (or, literally, “ghost man”). It “sealed the deal”, says Haydon, a New Zealander who lived in Hong Kong with her family from 2007 for almost a decade.
As local homemakers may still remember, for four years, through her Bowerbird Home store in Horizon Plaza, Haydon sold European-style, Asian-accented furniture, some of which she had designed for her own rental homes, on Magazine Gap Road, and later in Parkview, South Bay and Tai Tam.
Several of those pieces followed the family of seven to Sydney when they relocated in 2016. Soon after, Haydon and her husband, who works in finance, enlisted Luigi Rosselli to redesign and extend the small 1920s corner bungalow in Bellevue Hill that they had bought a few years earlier.
