Designing a Noosa Apartment Kitchen around Alpine Drift

We met our clients’ kids early in the design process. Both at uni, both lovely, both wearing the very specific guise of young adults who have just found out the family’s Noosa apartment is being renovated and are quietly calculating how many people they can fit in it.

The brief clarified itself on the spot. We needed a home that could hold the sophisticated end of girls weekend, a cold glass of wine on the balcony at sunset followed by a night out, as well as the kitchen island doubling as a beer pong table and a wildly optimistic amount of ice.

So we chose the stone first and let the rest of the house flow from there. Whatever went on that island had to take a hot pan, a spilled red and a sweating esky and show none of it the next morning. Hardwearing and importantly beautiful.

Alpine Drift was the one. Soft taupe, gentle movement, a showstopper that highlights the 6pm sunsets. Completely unbothered by heat, scratches and whatever gets left on it overnight.

It became the centre of the home, quite literally.

The old kitchen was boxed into a corner behind a bright blue island, with cold tiles underfoot and heavy timber Venetians shutting out a north-facing aspect that deserved better. We moved the whole kitchen into the middle of the apartment and built it around one generous island, a single solid slab of Alpine Drift with a mitred edge and softened angled corners.

The overhang is deliberately oversized. It seats the people who are helping and the people who are only pretending to help. There is a wine fridge tucked into the island, induction with downdraft extraction so nothing interrupts the sightline, and the same stone carried up the back bench and splashback, wrapping the windowsills, so the whole cooking zone reads as one calm plane rather than a collection of parts.

We carried Alpine Drift through to bathrooms also: vanity tops, splashbacks, shower ledges and half-round corner shelves with a bullnose detail. Warm against the tumbled tile, and forgiving about the daily reality of sunscreen, self tanner and salt water.

It sat perfectly with everything else we were layering in, the lime washed walls, the sandy toned tile, the soft timber detailing. Delicate white veining drifting through it, present enough to read as stone, restrained enough to stay chic.

The apartment photographed beautifully at golden hour. But the real test is slower than that. It is the summer after next, and the one after that, when a hundred lunches and one regrettable game of beer pong have come and gone, and the place still makes you exhale the moment you walk through the door.

That is the part you cannot style. You can only specify it.

Written by Morgan Brady

Pearl Interiors Studios, Noosa Heads