This Gold Coast garden apartment offers the very best in indoor-outdoor living
Story: Staff Writer
Photos: Rix-Ryan Photography

With its exclusive entry and private pool, the ultra-modern two-storey apartment of interior designer Suzie Beirne combines the best of both worlds: all the community benefits of a multi-unit development with the luxury and privacy afforded by an individual dwelling.

The apartment, part of a new 30-storey high-rise located in the exclusive Gold Coast enclave of Main Beach, has a generous living room linked to the garden, with kitchen and meals working together in another outdoor link as well as a dog-friendly mud room that leads to a side garden where herbs flourish in pots.

The garden has an unusual and rather compelling feature that consists of partitioned areas, rather like an aerial view of farming land, with sections of quartz agglomerate working back with another of symmetrical mondo grass (Ophiopogon japonicus) and then another of tiny white pebbles — all set against refined saw-cut stone walls and breaks of bamboo.

This is the backdrop for the above-ground pool, with water falling on two sides over adzed rock into a wide moat.

There are water features everywhere, sluicing over smooth pebbles between walls and into ponds and curved rock areas. Lighting features at night form a continuing light show in the surrounding gardens.

The developers allowed owners the opportunity to personalise their apartments to suit their individual lifestyle needs and, as the proprietor of one of the Gold Coast’s most well-known interior design firms, Maison Jardin, Suzie relished the chance to give the apartment her distinctive touch.

One of her favourite outdoor features is the pool with its unusual slab-glass end and infinity edge. To accommodate its above-ground construction, the pool is flanked by a raised pool deck. Although the pool is a stunning design feature in its own right, the reason it was built above ground level was because Suzie’s garden is directly above the underground car park that services the entire apartment building. This made it impossible to sink the pool into the ground. It also meant that any garden beds could only be about 300mm deep so only plants that do not have deep root systems could be used — hence the use of bamboo, agave (Agave attenuata) and frangipani (Plumeria rubra).

Both interior and exterior spaces have a strong emphasis on architectural structure and make excellent use of the play of light, both natural and artificial, but while the interior areas are consistently sharp and smart, the exterior areas mix the rough with the smooth. Rough hewn concrete slabs and faced stone mix with terrazzo and white conglomerate stone, which in turn both contrasts and complements the smooth, glassy surface of the pool water.

To cater for Suzie’s busy lifestyle, the outdoor areas are designed to be low-maintenance, so she can spend her time enjoying her courtyard-style garden rather than toiling away in it.