When it came to Vogue selecting a base for Mario Testino while he was in Sydney to guest-edit and photograph our April issue, one home stood out: Lighthouse 511, a two-storey, three-bedroom
penthouse sitting atop the recently launched Pacific Bondi Beach, an apartment and retail development at the northern end of Bondi’s beachside Campbell Parade. (Pacific Bondi Beach is also home to the QT Bondi hotel – see following story.)
The “lighthouse”, one of a series of domed penthouses that look like a row of Nissen huts on the roof of the building, faces the ocean to offer panoramic views from North Bondi south to Icebergs and the headlands beyond. “It’s unbelievably unique,” says Capit.el Group’s Eduard Litver, co-developer of Pacific Bondi, of the finished look. Litver’s brief to interior design firm SJB Interiors was to create in Lighthouse 511 “a space that is very much in Bondi but also a leisurely environment where you could be anywhere in the world”.
On the lower level of the penthouse there’s an entrance/living area and two bedrooms, all of which lead onto a terrace, with an internal lift and a spiral staircase transporting you to an upper level housing the master bedroom, open kitchen and an entertaining area that spills out onto a huge terrace with those killer views.
To create this idealised apartment, SJB was brought in to add layers on top of the work of Sydney firm Koichi Takada Architects, which created the kitchen, bathrooms and flooring.
“I really wanted this apartment to have that relaxed sophistication that you get at Bondi Beach, where you have this urban beach culture and this great mix of backpackers and high-end residents,” says SJB’s Jonathan Richards. “And it does have a cool elegance about it. It doesn’t feel too uptight, the furniture is low, all the colours are light and pale, and there’s a very great sense of height and lightness, making the most of a spectacular view of the beach.”
With Testino’s stay in mind, Richards collaborated with Jaci Foti- Lowe’s Hub Furniture to bring Litver’s concept of “barefoot luxury” to life. “I didn’t want to make it feel grungy at all, but I did want the furniture collection to feel a little bit eclectic,” says Richards. “There are local pieces and international classics and lesser-known designers in there. It’s a curated collection rather than it being all of the same type and range, and that responded to Bondi as well: a mosaic of different types of styles which were brought together in their tones and colours and unified in their textural feeling.”
With dazzling sunlight pouring into the apartment all day long, Richards says it was important that “the colours aren’t just straight white. We have deep greens and deeper olive colours and a deep black. It’s a palette that has balance and texture.”
The curved walls on the upper level posed several design challenges, not least of which was that art couldn’t be hung conventionally. “We addressed this by leaning artworks on the floor, by having sculptural light in the middle of the space, and pushing everything into the middle of the room,” says Richards, adding: “Having this long vaulted space creates an amazing vista out toward the water – rather than looking out a rectangular opening, it’s a sculptural aspect toward the horizon. It’s a very private feeling when you’re in there: the walls are coming up and over you and you aren’t conscious of your neighbours at all.”