Nicolette Stathopoulos

For Nicolette Stathopoulos, home isn’t just where the day ends, it’s where most of it happens. As a content creator and recipe developer, her kitchen doubles as her studio, which meant her renovation needed to deliver on two fronts at once: a space that could keep up with the demands of daily content and recipe work, and one that felt calm, comfortable and genuinely beautiful to come home to.

“I wanted to create a place that I could both live and work in every day,” Nicolette explains. “My content and recipe development means that I’m home a lot, so it needs to be functional for my work, but also feel pretty to look at every day and feel comfortable to wind down at the end of each day.”

The starting point for the entire apartment wasn’t a colour or a finish, it was the floor. Nicolette’s parquetry flooring holds deep sentimental value, and it became the anchor for every design decision that followed. “The parquetry flooring is sentimental to me, so I knew I had to base the interiors around this,” she says. “This really helped me with styling the space and what to look out for in terms of colours, textures and tones.”

That meant finding a stone that could carry the same warmth as the timber underfoot, which is exactly what led her to Naica.

“With the overall space being designed around the colour of the parquetry floorboards, I knew I had to pick something that had some warmth to it,” Nicolette says. “Naica has those beautiful blends of creamy ivory whites and soft beige tones, which really play into the warmth of the apartment.”

In a kitchen fitted out with top-of-the-range ASKO appliances, Nicolette wanted the benchtop and splashback to match that same standard, a genuine focal point for the whole home. “I wanted the bench and splashback to be a real statement piece, a wow moment if you will,” she says. “The warm tones of Naica add a step above luxury which I love looking at each time I walk into the space.”

For Nicolette, the look and feel of her kitchen isn’t just aesthetic, it directly shapes her work. As the space where the majority of her content creation and recipe development takes place, it needed to feel as elevated as the content she produces. “Having a space that looks and feels luxurious to cook in means I get to ‘go to work’ every day in a luxurious space,” she says. “Having the luxury look and feel is so important as it inspires me to do my best each and every day so that I can provide really high-quality content to my audience.”

Months on, Nicolette says the benchtop has delivered on both fronts, beauty and durability. “Aesthetically, I get to wake up each day and step into a kitchen that to me looks and feels luxurious,” she says. “It blends in perfectly with the warmth that I’ve brought to the apartment with my styling.”

It’s the practical side, though, that’s won her over in daily use. As someone constantly working with sauces, citrus and everything in between, Nicolette says she no longer has to think twice. “I love how durable the surface is, I’ve dropped plenty of sauces and citrus and it hasn’t affected the surface whatsoever,” she says. “I know with other natural stones I’d have to constantly be careful, but I love how carefree I can be in the kitchen and not worry about damaging the surface.”

For Nicolette, Naica has become more than a benchtop,  it’s the backdrop to a home and career built around the same space, delivering the warmth, luxury and resilience she needed to live and work well in it, every single day.