A nice drop

This store, "Wine Experience" at Rosalie, Brisbane is a client of Hartley Shopfitters. It's located in the Baroona Rd precinct. Although the store has been there for a number of years, towards the end of 2009, Hartleys did a major refurb. It looked fantastic after and had a really nice and dark moody feel. The store has a mezzanine section at the back and then a type of attic room, where they run wine appreciation courses.
http://www.wineexperience.com.au/

During January this year most people would have Wine Experience on tv, however you would have only seen the top of the store facade above the flood water. Pretty much the whole store was flooded except for this top attic room. Some wine was able to be moved upstairs into this room, other bottles were moved off site, but a lot of stock was still lost. As soon as the water receded the guys from Hartleys were over there helping to clean up and then running all the new joinery thru the factory. Fortunately the plans were easily at hand and it's always quicker to construct a 2nd time round!

After a long year for the owners of Wine Experience; father and son Denis and Michael Nolan, are just finishing off the last areas. Hartley's have just made this wall mural for their attic room.  It's made from timber wine crates with the manufacturers stamps on them. Some of the crates are very old and rare. I had the fun job of laying them out to see what type of pattern we could get. It was like making a patch work quilt out of timber.

We might even look at some more wine inspired art for this area. This is a little project I made a while ago for myself. No, I didn't drink all the bottles myself!

A parting note with a wine undertone- if you consider yourself a "land lubber" and can never remember your port from your starboard, here's the trick.

"There's always Port left at the end of the night."

On the grass!

Here's a bit of fun that I had recently. Grass where you wouldn't expect it. Astro turf in fact. It's a barber shop at Whites Hill in Brisbane. I thought it would be good to play with some masculine elements such as grass and Western red cedar. When the shop was completed it had a really strong smell from the cedar, which also added to the "blokey" feel.

When I started looking into artificial grass, I realised what a huge range there was. It's used by golf courses for the putting ranges as well as other sports and also local councils on road side strips. The grass comes in a variety of pile heights and some even has the brownish undergrowth effect.

Capalaba Produce

This is one of my favourite stores and well known to residents on the South East side of Brisbane. Capalaba Produce is fantastic and huge and constantly busy. They have all range of products for gardens, feed for livestock, as well as livestock such as chickens, ducklings, all types of birds, fish,  a fantastic plant nursery, pet supplies and even a little "farm" called Ted's corner.
There's something for everyone to look at. My kids love walking through Ted's Corner and patting the pigs, goats and sheep.
It's very common to drive into the car park and see one of the resident peacocks on full display with his tail up. The giant turkeys wander freely amongst the car park and there is also a fluffy chook who spends her days in the plant nursery as she gets picked on by the other chooks in the main pen.
The staff are a wealth of knowledge and carry all heavy bags to your car.

I love the facade which was constructed a few years ago. It has the look of an old Western town.

We Made Home Beautiful!

Very exciting news- my house has made it into the December issue of Home Beautiful, currently in the shops. The photo shoot was done in March and as I've learned in magazine world, there are very long lead times. Some of the home design magazines have stories stacked up in excess of 12 months.

My kids are very excited and the magazine has gone to school for show and tell. The photo shoot itself was a really fun day. We had the photographer and stylist there all day and they really do earn their money as it was a lot of work to take the original 20 photos. By the end of the day we were all very exhausted.

In some of the kitchen photos what you don't see are the dirty dishes hidden in the sink and the rest of the lunch crockery thrown into the dishwasher and other cupboards, just for the sake of creating the appearance of clear benches! Let's face it, anyone with kids knows how hard it is to keep the house spotless.

Happy Reading!

Tropical Lush

A weekend of gardening ahead with dreams of creating my own tropical oasis. I always love visiting locations that have lovely landscaping. We are so lucky in Qld to be able to easily create  lush tropical gardens. I know our Southern cousins look on with envy, however I think sometimes we do the same with their cold climate gardens full of abundant roses and all types of beautiful Autumn trees.
This is some inspiration from the grounds of Maison Noosa (one of my favourite towns) and the nearby Ginger Factory which has it's incredible ginger and flower festival coming up in January.

A stitch in time

These exciting finishes are actually classed as laminates. They're from the Sibu range which Halifax is distributing. I'm really excited about the stitched leather. There are a heap of stitching patterns and colours. It opens up a whole new world for shopfitouts. Previously we would need to send that part of the job off to the upholsterer with very specific instructions about the thread, stitch sizes etc, whereas now these can be applied in the factory along with the other laminated surfaces. The fabric type finishes including the furs, all come on a flexible backing, which also allow them to be bent around corners. One of the downfalls with traditional laminate is the black line you get along the edges. I'm looking forward to using these in upcoming jobs.

My Secret Garden

This beautiful store in Teneriffe, Brisbane is owned by Rick Majewski and Kerry Ryan. Rick is the very talented graphic designer who designed my Bailey Retail logo. Opening this store has been a dream of Rick's and it's wonderful to see dreams come to fruition!
My secret garden is aimed at all the inner city and Newstead, Valley residents who live in apartments and have small gardens. Rick has an eye for gorgeous product and I am fortunate that when I visit his store he shows me through all his stock, as I get so distracted by it all that I can't concentrate to talk about normal things with him.
My secret garden is in Florence St and definitely worth visiting.

cottage elements

For the past couple of weeks I've been driving past this Queenslander cottage in Springhill. It's been at various times of the afternoon and on some occassions I've seen the lights on behind this screening. I love the effective look created by such a simple use of vertical and horizontal timber studs. The lush palms and foliage behind really set off the white.

Out and About

This is an interesting little cafe that has been catching my eye as I drive through Coorparoo. It's called "The Gallery Soho". It's one of the trendy little "hole in the wall" cafe and coffee outlets that are becoming very popular at the moment and has an interesting blend of hexagonal mosaic tiles, hand blown glass pendants, exciting wall graphics and lots of oiled timber all complimented by the planter boxes at the front which add a nice distraction to the concrete of the adjacent shops.