With her wealth of knowledge gained from working on the Nine Network’s The Block and Reno Rumble, Australian television personality, Shelley Craft, is no stranger to the world of renovations. So, when she decided to build a new studio in a sunny corner of her backyard, it’s no surprise she had a clear (and unique!) vision of what she wanted to achieve.

The actual house is only eight years’ old but it has a distinct mid-century design style. “I really wanted to keep that sort of streamlined, mid-century style profile for the studio as well,” says Shelley. “Harley Graham Architects, who I know does a lot of work with AWS, came over. He’s a local here in Byron, so we just sat for a while on the deck, looked out to the space and thought, what can we create here…We decided it would be best to be in keeping with the original home and I think he absolutely nailed it.”

A significant design feature was how the studio would look when viewed from inside the main house. Shelley wanted it to appear like it was floating on a concrete shelf. The inclusion of LED lighting adds to the effect. “It looks almost like a floating spaceship at night!” she says.

“Cross-ventilation was hugely important. It was top of my list so we’ve got these amazing louvres in the bathroom flowing through to the louvres in the bedroom plus the open sliding doors, it’s just this beautiful feeling of having the fan on all day long in there.”

One of the challenges was creating a space that could feel like a pavilion, as opposed to a big, heavy building or simply another part of the house. In consultation with AWS fabricator, SGA Windows, Shelley decided the Vantage sliding door was really the only option for her. “Once I saw it I thought, it’s got all the qualities that we were looking for: that sort of nice, wide frame that matched in with the existing house. Of course, the aluminium is perfect because it [the clear anodised finish] blends, these beautiful big D handles that sort of have a lot of strength to them but they slide so seamlessly. They’re big, heavy doors and yet they just float over and fit perfectly into the slab. It looks like it’s been here forever.” 

Photographer: Andy Macpherson