Queens Park House by Arent&Pyke is a romantic restoration of a federal bungalow in Sydney's eastern suburbs, suitable for a family of four. Restoring Victorian and Federal housing to its former glory through a vibrant and layered design approach. After working with the designer, the owners of Queens Park House contacted Arent&Pyke and Ben Vitale for a site visit immediately after purchasing the bungalow. After several years of collaborative design, the result is a relaxed and fun family home filled with historical details and grand heritage 'gestures'.

Sarah-jane Pyke, co-founder and principal of Arent&Pyke, says federal bungalows are one of her favorite home types. To accommodate the owners' social needs, their two energetic teenage boys and their dogs, two cats, a lizard and a parrot, the design team needed to rethink the layout of the home to ensure the most practical and efficient floor plan. Ben Vitale has inserted a floor over the roof of the original bungalow, barely visible from the street. He then created a floor below for storage, a laundry room and a cellar.

The front of the house was carefully preserved, while the circa 1980s rear extension was the first to go. The scale and proportion of the extension is large and does not bring any meaning to this beautiful home. As the house faces the park, Arent&Pyke and Ben Vitale change the feeling of arrival, so the new entrance is a Spanish villa style structure, accessed through a curved opening with French doors, which is through the new addition. When you walk through the garden and come in from the kitchen and see the house at first sight, it's just beautiful.

Colourful kitchens are a feature of Arent&Pyke's project. Queens Park House's low-key green kitchen is the first room you see when you walk in, so it has to make a statement. The kitchen is anchored by seaweed colours and tactile layers of wood and marble, while a curved island bench enables cabinetry and softens the kitchen. Here, dark eucalyptus cabinets balance with comfortable ivory Island benches that seat six, a key element of family dinners.

An extensive butler pantry equipped with an oven, spacious workspace and storage provides ample space for the avid chef to relax and entertain. Meanwhile, the main kitchen is kept clean and tidy by integrated appliances. The family living space offers another opportunity to connect the old with the new. The design studio deliberately did not introduce a traditional cape, which would have felt like it was stuck on, instead we cut it short but kept the same height considerations in terms of level and shape. Arent&Pyke found space to establish peaceful moments for this vibrant family home, the front living room. This space is a completely child-free area, located at the front of the house, filled with a variety of objects.

In redesigning the house from this period, one of the key elements Arent&Pyke worked hard to address was connecting the ceiling of the new space with the intricately-detailed ceiling of the old house. Flat plasterboard would be unthinkable in this space, so the studio chose a slight separation of panels on the new ceiling to give the feeling of a balanced dialogue between old and new.

This subtle 'gesture' continues upstairs, where architect Ben Vitale cleverly made room for a master bedroom, ensuite, walk-in closet and private home office. The designers likened the upstairs solitude to a peaceful oasis where the eye meets the sky and the treetops. Downstairs is a feast of color and pattern, while upstairs is a more sober and sophisticated color scheme of muted grays, red-hot terracotta and navy blue. Linear wall cladding, a classic en-suite bathroom, whole master ensuite and traditional fixtures elegantly balance old and new.