How to modernise your brick home without rendering
Hi, today I want to talk about how to modernise your brick home without rendering. So, before I get into that, I just want to introduce myself. I’m Jane Eyles-Bennett, and I’m an exterior and interior designer from Hotspace Consultants. I’m not an architect, but I specialise in exterior (particularly facade) renovations for people who don’t want to go to an architect and have some crazy wacko ideas thrown at them that they can’t afford.
So that’s what I do.
Talking about rendering brick or not rendering brick. What I see is that when someone is looking at modernising their brick home, the first thing they think of doing is rendering it. Now, I’m all for rendering the right sort of home, and it certainly can make a massive difference, but there are some downsides to it.
So, when you render a house and just render the brick but you don’t do anything else, you can tell. You can tell that it’s an old seventies house that’s got a new cardigan on and a new lick of paint. The reason is because it still has the same windows, it still has a lot of the same features, and although it looks better, it looks worse because it looks incomplete. I don’t know if you’ve seen houses like that around but I’ve seen a lot of them and they look dreadful.
I also think that rendering is the right thing to do in many situations, but what I want to talk to you about today is when you don’t have to render, and if you can’t afford to render or if you just don’t want to render. If you don’t like the idea of ongoing maintenance, you certainly can not render your home and make it look amazing.
I’ve done lots of designs for owners of brick homes who haven’t wanted to render but they’ve wanted to modernise. So we do things like, for instance, a client that we were working with a couple of weeks ago where around the garage door, we boxed that out and we clad it. We then added a sort of portico thing over the front pathway. We left the brick as it was, but we rendered the new structures, the non-structural structures if you know what I mean. By doing that, we’re offsetting the brick, we’re introducing a new element, we’re introducing some contrast and some depth, and that’s what makes a house look good.
So, if you go on to the internet and you have a look at brick houses – let’s say you look at some modern brick houses, new build brick houses – they often look really good, and the reason they look really good is because there is that contrast of materials. You know, maybe there’s some brick, maybe there’s some timber, maybe there’s some render. It’s not just all brick.
And I think that’s where people go wrong. They think they have to render the house, so they put a skin of render over the top, and they paint all that, and it still looks the same but just a different colour.
So my message today is if you are renovating a brick house, regardless of whether you are going to render it or not render it, make sure you think about those extra elements to give it some depth and some balance. Give it some visual balance and give it a focal point – the front entry door or something like that. One key, strong focal point on the front façade of the house and you don’t have to render to make it look amazing.
I hope that’s helpful, and if anybody needs a hand redesigning their facade, you can get in touch with me at Hotspace Consultants.
Good morning everyone. How are you today? This is Jane Eyles-Bennett. I’m the founder of this group, and I’m an interior and exterior designer.
Today I want to talk about choosing one star or feature per room when you’re renovating. You might go with two, but I typically would go with one main feature.
What got me thinking about this is a kitchen and living room renovation that I’m helping a client with in Sydney and my client has got this idea of a bench-top which is stunning, it’s called Excava from Caesarstone. She also gave me a floor tile called Bostonstone.
So, she’s come to me and she’s said, “I love this, and I love that, but I’m just not sure what to do with the rest of the house.” And she doesn’t want to overdo it, and with a product like this – Excava – you know, you could really overdo it. You’ve got to be careful to have just one main feature in the area and then the rest, you know, doesn’t mean it has to be all white at all, but you really want to tone down the other contrasts in the area. It might be that you use a charcoal grey or you use a white, but maybe the splash-back is the same colour as the bench-top or the cabinetry.
You don’t have a chop change, chop change kind of thing going on with the colours and things in the room. You choose one key feature and the rest sort of goes around that, but you don’t want to compete with that key feature.
I’m talking about a kitchen here, but it could be the same thing for your bathroom. I noticed someone last night or this morning posted a photo in our group of their new bathroom with the feature floor and then she did white on the walls. I can’t remember what the vanity was, but it was great because she had really neutral walls and then her feature was the floor. Even if the vanity was a charcoal or a timber, that’s sort of enough, not too much going on.
That’s just a thing to think about. Choose your star first, and then design everything else around it. If you don’t want a star, that’s completely fine, or if your star is a timber vanity or a splash-back, that’s completely fine as well, but just don’t add too many feature elements on top of one another.
This could also apply to the exterior of your home. If you don’t want to do too much to the facade, then what you want to do is focus on the entrance. The focal point should be where the entry point is and that could be all sorts of things. It could be landscaping, it could be some new feature paneling, it could be a new roof over the top of the entry as I would often to do for clients to make more of a feature of that area.
Just try to think one, maybe two, key elements, key star features per room and then the rest is neutral.
Hope that’s helpful. If you need any help with anything, you know I’m an interior designer and an exterior designer. I would love to help you so just message me if you wish.
Hey, good morning everyone.
Today I wanted to jump on and talk about how to get the biggest bang for your buck when you’re renovating your home. So for those who don’t know me, my name is Jane Eyles-Bennett. I’m the founder of this group and I’m an interior and exterior designer. I totally love what I do and really love being in this group and interacting with everyone.
Let’s talk about how to get the biggest bang for your buck.
So, the first thing to do is to focus your money on the key areas. What got me thinking about this is I went to a client’s property the other day, Rachel, a most amazing family, and they had quite a lot to do.
This particular family were renovating to sell. Of course, I work with people who are renovating to stay and everything but anyway, they were saying should we do this, should we do that? What I found was, they were really thinking about renovating areas that really didn’t have a lot of impact on the overall feeling or usability of the property. There was a kind of back area of the back yard – should we do this, should we do that? Should we do this in the laundry?
There were some pretty cool ideas, but then we also had a budget to work to and we had to completely replace the kitchen, do up the bathrooms and the exterior, redo the flooring right throughout, paint right throughout, and so it really could have spiraled out of control.
It just got me thinking and I really wanted to let you know – be really focused on where you spend your money when doing renovations. If you’re living in the property, that’s probably going to be your kitchen, and your living spaces and maybe your outdoor living spaces.
If you’re renovating to sell, then it’s probably going to be the façade, and then the living spaces and things. Obviously, bathrooms do get some loving at some point, but they’re probably less of a priority because they’re kind of the last things that people see.
So that’s a pretty key thing.
Don’t try to do everything. Don’t spread your money too thin. My belief is do the areas you can do well. Do them really well. Don’t try and do them three quarters and then spread your money elsewhere. Do a few key areas really well and enjoy them until you can afford to do the next thing. Work out which areas get the most use.
The last thing is, just remember that a good clean and a tidy up can do wonders and that really is what this client needed to do. They just needed to tidy up that part of their yard and some other areas of their home. They have four children so very understandable that it was a little bit untidy in some areas. Wasn’t too bad.
So don’t underestimate the power of a good clean up, a good tidy, and then focus your money on the key areas of your house so that you’re really doing the best you can in those areas and then making the best of the rest, if you know what I mean
Okay, I hope that is helpful. If you need help with any design, for your renovation or new build or renovating to sell or renovating to live, send me a message.
