VELVET DISCO
Residential Decoration
Client: Private
Location: Richmond, Victoria
Photography: Timothy Kaye
Media: Vogue Living, EST Living, The Local Project, Yinjispace
Awards: Shortlisted - Australian Interior Design Awards 2021
Velvet Disco is the designer’s own apartment on the Yarra in Richmond—plush, charismatic and deliberately intimate. Conceived as a home for Nickolas Gurtler, it is an “expression of a decade of designing and hunting for treasures”: a place that is comfortable and glamorous, and a perfect backdrop for informal cocktail evenings. The sensibility leans into a refined ’70s mood—bold, tactile and edited—where glamour is held in check by discipline.
Planning works like good tailoring. Within a compact footprint, scale and proportion are tuned so rooms feel composed rather than crowded. The second bedroom is reimagined as an intimate dining room to support hosting and occasional work. Built-in joinery carries the architecture, concealing storage and services so negative space can do as much work as object. An ambient lighting plan privileges glow over glare, allowing atmospheres to shift from day to evening with ease.
Materiality is the signature. Velvet, marble and brass establish weight and patina; surfaces that meet the hand are softened, edges that take structure are tightened. In the living room, a brown velvet ‘Agent 86’ sofa by Grazia & Co anchors the composition—the starting point for the scheme—around which art, lighting and objects gather with curatorial precision. A customised Prometheus IV table lamp by Christopher Boots casts a warm, hypnotic ring of light; an Atollo lamp sits on the studio’s ‘Acropolis’ side table, its fluted form nodding to Doric columns. A silver-gelatin print by Herb Ritts converses with contemporary works by Tom Adair, setting a dialogue between vintage glamour and the present.
The dining room brings focus and restraint, with Liam Mugavin chairs and a second Adair piece. Private spaces continue the language: the bedroom layers monochrome with a sculptural lamp by Lost Profile Studio; in the kitchen, an Apparatus lamp punctuates glossy black tile.
Velvet Disco operates like a salon within a small plan—precise, sensual and unmistakably authored. Collected rather than decorated, it distils the studio’s point of view into daily life: a measured interplay of proportion, texture and light that makes the familiar feel cinematic.