A gilded luminosity carries throughout Holbrook House, a sense that this West Brunswick family home, through a singular, exacting design lens, has been crafted to make one slow down and admire its fine grain. To swill each detail around every sense and then settle into one of the carefully curated furniture vignettes, languishing amid the home’s sculptural visual language and artisanal beauty.
Designed by Brahman Perera, Holbrook House is a symphony of styles melded into something entirely apart. It draws on Art Deco’s streamlined forms, ornamentation and geometric motifs; Mid Century’s preference for symmetry and rich, grained timbers; an almost Victorian peppering of tumbled and oil-rubbed architectural doorware; and contemporary design’s edited precision.
Resting on a steep gradient that has cultivated a tiered architectural response and shaped an interior defined by visual opportunism, the residence is a collection of dissolving and recomposing spaces. Light wells, voids and courtyards coax navigation in an exploratory manner, revealing spaces fluidly and accentuating the cohesiveness of a richly layered interior design scheme defined by meticulously crafted joinery and material sincerity.
Amidst a curation of dark and toffee-hued timbers, parquetry flooring, undulating blown glass pendants, polished plaster, reeded glass, wool, sumptuous textiles in terracotta, dusty bark, olive green and caramel, and a spectrum of honed and polished stones that bestow a cool mineralogy, the abiding materials that mediate between all are bronze and brass. Working alongside Pittella to procure pieces that elevate Holbrook House’s interiors to a place of mercurial artistry, Brahman Perera selected products based on their agility and aesthetic accord. “Brem loves the organic nature of beauty and how that translates into a design language,” explains Simone Pittella, Managing Director of Pittella. “He’s brilliant with colour and finishes, so he’s recognised in us a product that brings unique visual poetry into his work.”
Reflecting the burnished character of furniture legs, lighting, stair railing and joinery cladding forged from different metals, Holbrook House features tumbled brass robe hooks in the children’s bedrooms, oil-rubbed doorware in bathrooms and powder rooms, and the Valentina door pull.
“Brem’s seen the distinction of our products, our organisation and our passion for what we do,” says Simone. “We are in sync with our design philosophy and methodologies, drawn to organic patterns and patinas to cultivate work that is unlike anything else out there.”
Originally envisioned as an exterior element, the Valentina Door Pull from Pittella’s Valentina Design Family has been entirely reimagined at Holbrook House. “Brem can use products in both traditional and non-traditional ways. He’s not concerned with staying inside arbitrary lines, which is why his work is so beautifully border-defying,” says Simone. “At Holbrook House, there are a million examples of this, but one is how he uses the Valentina Door Pull. Brem used it internally on a cupboard. He’s also used the small version in a powder room as a towel rail. There’s an inherent allure in forging new gestures from the unconventional.”
Echoing Pittella’s ethos of beauty being a fundamental facet of design, one that is achieved through rigorous, skilled discipline to reach an outcome that becomes an enhancement to everyday life, Brahman Perera’s approach to Holbrook House demonstrates a capacity to delve into unchartered design territory, seeing with rare clarity each space, its constraints, context and potential in stark relief to garner outcomes that are rinsed of preconceived ideas. Here, that has translated into joinery that flows seamlessly into furniture, weighty materials composed in a way that implies gravity-defying lightness, stripes and florals engaging in quiet conversation and rooms lined in stone that feel warm and cocooning.
“Brem’s culture comes through in his work,” reflects Simone. “We love the colours he uses, the tapestry and textiles and the richness of his work. That’s what Pittella is all about, and that cultured appeal is reflected in the materials we work with. The uniqueness of brass and its ironmongery defines a project’s atmosphere. It takes on all these different facets and ideas through finishes and tones. It’s a chameleon. It can be shiny and bright, dull and beautiful, but it can also be sublime and everlasting.” In Brahman’s hands, brass and other metals, and the pieces forged from them, become the fixed stars of Holbrook House’s existence.
