Lauren and Danny were freshly engaged when they walked into their Payneham home and fell for it.
There was no pre-approval, no plan to sell their existing property and no carefully mapped-out move. By that night, they had made an offer.
For Lauren, there was one thing she already knew.
“I want to be in our forever home before we have children,” she remembers saying. “Because then we’re going to start memories here and then have to move the memories.”
They moved quickly to buy the house. Everything they have done inside it has happened far more slowly.
Curating a home, not filling one
Lauren describes their style as “mid-century eclectic maximalism”, but the home never feels designed around a label.
Chrome sits beside timber. Deep greens, blues, pinks and oranges move through the rooms. Contemporary furniture lives alongside vintage pieces, Marketplace finds, op-shop discoveries and things Lauren and Danny have made themselves.
What makes the home feel so personal is the way Lauren curates it.
She is not interested in filling a room simply because there is space to fill. She would rather wait until she finds something that speaks to her. Sometimes it is the colour or shape. Sometimes it is the history she imagines a piece might already carry. Often, it is simply a feeling.
“You don’t have to just do what everyone else is doing because everyone else is doing it,” Lauren says. “You can push against and make it your own.”
That instinct runs deep. Lauren’s mother is a pattern maker and dressmaker, while her aunt and uncle are artists. As a child, visits often involved painting plates that would later be fired in their kiln.
Today, the house has become another creative outlet.
Lauren and Danny run Studio Spring, and Lauren describes her working role as much more operational and systems driven. At home, another side of her gets room to emerge.
“I was always drawing, or painting, or sketching, or colouring, or making things,” she says. “So, in this space, I feel like I can bring out a bit more of my creative side.”
Art moves. Ceramics are rearranged. A piece might shift several times before returning almost exactly to where it started.
There is no rush to finish the house.
Art and pieces with a story
Art is one of the strongest threads running through the home.
Their friend Madi Lynott, who works as Household Hermit, has created several pieces for them, including a painting based on a photograph of Lauren and Danny in Bali. They have also collected work by Cassidy Jackson over several years.
“Once you get a taste for a big piece of art like that, you’re kind of doomed.”
The green dining table carries another story. Lauren and Danny had found a table they loved but could no longer buy, so they sourced a secondhand base, found a deep green stone slab and made their own.
Lauren later tried to sell it.
Then changed her mind.
“I feel like a bit emotionally connected to the table.”
Near the entrance is a painting of a monk brought home from Sri Lanka, where Danny was born and where the couple later married in the hills near Kandy. They removed its timber frame, rolled the canvas for the journey and later reframed it in Adelaide.
Their wedding appears elsewhere too: a framed green linen napkin, their guest book and a large bridal photograph treated more like an artwork than a conventional wedding portrait.
The TH Brown Trend Lounge and Footstool
One of the most personal pieces in the home also arrived through the wedding.
The TH Brown Trend Lounge and Footstool were chosen as a gift by Lauren’s bridesmaids, Jamila (Jami) and Elle.
“It’s quite an intimate activity buying furniture for someone else,” Lauren says. “It’s a risky game that they’re playing.”
Jami and Elle even chose the olive green.
“They’re like my sisters. They know me. They know Danny. They know us as a couple.”
Designed by Peter Brown, the Trend brings a sculptural piece of Australian mid-century furniture design into a contemporary Adelaide home already layered with art, colour, vintage finds and collected pieces.
Lauren loves its tactile quality too.
“I literally will stroke sometimes because of the soft velvet, and I can’t help myself. It’s very tactile.”
More importantly, she lives in it.
The Trend Lounge and Footstool have become her favourite place to work. She curls up, sits cross-legged or stretches out with her laptop, coffee nearby and usually Honey or Bear somewhere in the room.
“I love it,” she says. “It’s like literally my office.”
Lauren and Danny may have found their forever home quickly.
The beauty is in how slowly they are making it theirs.
Explore more from our In Residence series.
We would also like to acknowledge our brilliant In Residence South Australian Photographer
Gareth Williams, Art Department Creative
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