Belleview is a minimalist residential interior located in Bellevue Hill, Sydney, Australia, designed by Lawless & Meyerson. The renovation of a Mediterranean-style home overlooking Sydney Harbour carries a particular tension: how do you modernise without erasing? The existing house, renovated more than two decades prior, held strong bones and a connection to the harbour that the clients were unwilling to sacrifice. What Lawless & Meyerson proposed was not a clean break but a deepening – stripping away what had dated and layering in materials and forms that felt rooted rather than arrived at.
MHNDU’s architectural intervention preserved the original Mediterranean character while allowing for substantial spatial reorganisation. The ground floor was restructured around a relocated kitchen, scullery, and a large library conceived as the social core of family life – a deliberate inversion of the conventional hierarchy that places the living room at the centre. Upstairs, the new master suite and additional bedrooms claim the upper floor, with the spiral staircase serving as the primary architectural set piece. Rendered in plaster with a sculptural fluidity that echoes early 20th-century Catalan Modernisme, it reads less as circulation and more as a spatial event – light from the perforated metal entry door casting geometric shadow patterns across its curved wall.
Terrazzo and limestone – both already present in the house – were not replaced but reinterpreted in warmer tones, enveloping bathrooms, thresholds, and the pool terrace in a tactile consistency. The custom silver travertine kitchen island, its surface heavily veined and aged-looking, anchors the kitchen with the kind of geological weight that reads as permanence rather than trend. Chocolate-stained herringbone timber floors throughout carry an almost narrative function – the diagonal patterning lending the suggestion of accumulated history, the stain deepening the connection to the warm ochre palette of the Mediterranean vernacular that informs the whole project.
