Interior designer Perth: limestone, western light and salt air

The western sun runs the room

Most good Perth blocks put the living space on the west side, where the water is. You pay for that view after four o'clock in summer. Perth gets 8.8 hours of sun a day and about 139 clear days a year on Bureau of Meteorology records, more than any other capital. Glare comes off the Indian Ocean at eye level and lands on the floor, the joinery and the wall behind the television.

Heavier curtains are not the fix. We plan the room around the light instead. Sheers go on the west face with a block out layer behind. Floor finishes get a low sheen so the reflection breaks up, and joinery stays matte. In Cottesloe and City Beach we push the deeper colours onto the east wall.

Fabric catches people out. A dark cotton sofa on a west window fades in about two summers, so solution dyed fibres and paler grounds earn their price. Applecross faces the river rather than the ocean, so the glare hits through the middle of the day instead.

Limestone sets the palette before you do

Perth is built on limestone and you see it everywhere: front fences, retaining walls, whole facades in the older streets of Dalkeith. It reads honey in the morning and close to white by noon. That colour comes through the windows, so it is part of your scheme whether you planned it or not.

Cool grey whites go dirty next to it. Warm off whites, oatmeal and soft clay tones hold up. Brass and aged bronze sit well with limestone, while chrome looks cold beside it. If you are choosing stone for an island, we look at it outside against the wall, not under a showroom light.

People ask about the 70/30 rule, which gives roughly seventy per cent of a room to one dominant tone and thirty to the contrast. In Perth the seventy is often decided for you by what sits outside the window. The thirty is where residential interior design in Perth holds together or falls apart.

The Fremantle Doctor gets into the hardware

The sea breeze that arrives most summer afternoons has a name here. The Fremantle Doctor comes in from the south west and averages close to 28 kilometres an hour at 3pm at Swanbourne, on Bureau of Meteorology records. It carries salt a long way inland, and it works on door hardware, tap spouts, window tracks and light fittings. Owners often notice the pitting a year later.

Any interior designer Perth coastal homes rely on has to specify for corrosion, not only for looks. Near the water we use 316 grade stainless for external hardware and marine grade powder coat on aluminium. Unlacquered brass stays in rooms closed to the breeze. A house three streets back gets a different answer to one on the front row.

Prestart is a poor place to design a house

If you are building with a Perth project builder, most of your interior decisions land in one prestart appointment. A few hours, a selections booklet, and every colour, tile, tap and power point signed off. It suits the builder. It is a hard way to design a home.

We work ahead of prestart instead. The palette, joinery layouts and lighting plan are settled before you walk in, so the appointment becomes a transcription job. It also shows you early which items your builder cannot supply well, and which are better taken out of the contract. That call is where the budget is won or lost.

Not every job needs a full home design. Some owners want a Perth interior design consultant for prestart alone: a palette, selections and a document the builder can price. We scope that separately.

An international studio working on Perth time

Search for interior designers Perth wide and you get the interior design firms based inside the city. Our model is different. Luxxe is an international studio and delivers to Perth through drawings, 3D renders and virtual reality walkthroughs. You walk the kitchen at full size before a cabinetmaker prices it.

Perth runs two hours behind the east coast in winter and three in summer, so work we issue at the end of our day is in your inbox before you start yours. We fly in when the job needs eyes on site, at documentation and again at install.

The studio has completed four residences on the Sovereign Islands, among them homes of more than 4,000 square metres internal floor area and valued at more than $20 million. Luxxe delivered the interiors of Duddingston House, the Category A listed Palladian mansion in Edinburgh designed by Sir William Chambers in the 1760s. Work at a distance is normal here, including Lindfield and Blakehurst in Sydney.

What an interior designer Perth project covers

Fees are quoted per project once the scope is settled, because a full home in Dalkeith and a laundry rework in Applecross are not the same work. Studios price one of two ways: a fixed fee against a defined scope, or an hourly rate for open ended work. Whoever you settle on as the best interior designer Perth has for your job, ask for a quote on your rooms rather than a headline number, and ask what happens when the scope grows.

Whether it is worth paying for comes down to what the fee steers. Design sets the joinery, the stone and the tiling, and those trades cost far more than drawings. The expensive errors are the ones nobody caught until they were built. Send a floor plan, a few photos, and the direction your main living room faces, and Tammy will tell you what the house needs.

• Full home interior design, from spatial planning to installation
• Prestart selections and palettes for new builds with a Perth project builder
• Kitchen, bathroom and laundry design, with joinery drawings a cabinetmaker can price
• 3D renders and virtual reality walkthroughs before anything is built
• Home cinema and bar design
• Renovations, working alongside your builder
• Drafting, documentation and collaboration with your architect
• Decoration, furniture and styling