Andrew and Janelle’s West End apartment may technically be a two bedroom inner city home, but it does not feel small when you walk through the door.
After their daughters had grown up and left home, they moved from a larger family house in The Gap for something closer to the city. For Andrew, a musician, composer and educator, being nearer to Brisbane’s music and cultural life made sense.
What is most striking is how completely they have reshaped the apartment around the way they actually live.
Food has always been central to Janelle’s family, so the second bedroom became a dining room. Their adult daughters still return for family dinner each week, friends gather regularly, and the apartment has hosted around twenty five people at once.
Outside, Andrew’s much loved garden has simply moved upwards.
The balcony is dense with greenery, with places to sit tucked among the plants and views across the neighbourhood. There are chairs everywhere, places to eat, talk, read, listen or pick up an instrument, and by the time you move from the dining room to the living space and out onto the balcony, it is easy to forget how compact the apartment actually is.
Music is woven through all of it.
A piano from the family home sits in the main space. Guitars are left where they can be picked up. Andrew’s main instrument is saxophone, and most of the music he performs is his own.
“That’s the thing about living somewhere small,” he says. “Everything’s really close.”
For a composer, that closeness can be useful.
“That can come at any time,” Andrew says of musical ideas.
Music has taken Andrew well beyond Brisbane. Through a Churchill Fellowship he spent time in the United States, including several weeks in New York, studying, taking lessons, attending gigs and playing. He leads the Andrew Butt Trio Plus and is involved in running the Brisbane International Jazz Festival.
Those years sit quietly throughout the apartment in records, instruments, photographs and posters from places the family has travelled together.
Janelle’s own family history is equally present.
She is fourth generation Australian Chinese, with ancestors who arrived during the nineteenth century gold rush era. The family has an unusually rich archive of documents and photographs, including an old immigration handprint belonging to one of Janelle’s ancestors.
Andrew’s side of the family appears through furniture too. One piece belonged to his parents and was refinished by his mother around forty years ago.
“Family’s everything,” Andrew says.
That history also helps explain his connection to TH Brown.
Andrew already knew the brand from its original era through the furniture he had seen growing up and in second hand stores. Years later, he rediscovered TH Brown through the reissued collection.
The first pieces he and Janelle chose were the Martelle Bar Stools.
They now sit at the kitchen bench and look completely at home in the apartment. Their scale suits the space, the timber brings warmth into the room and the form works naturally alongside the other mid century references.
Then came the Rondo Pouffe Table Suite.
In this room, it is difficult to imagine anything else working quite as well.
The Rondo sits at the centre of the living area without dominating it, while its ability to change function suits the way Andrew and Janelle live. When friends or family arrive, the pouffes become extra seating. When Andrew is composing, one moves closer.
“Quite often if I’m doing composing, I’ll sort of pull that out and have it as a little table for writing ideas.”
Andrew’s attraction to TH Brown also connects to the way he thinks about creative work more broadly.
“I’m attracted to, being a musician that creates my own music, that thing of people creating in Australia and being creative and having a product which is good.”
It was a genuine pleasure to spend time in Andrew and Janelle’s home. Walking through the door feels less like entering a two bedroom inner city apartment and more like being invited into their world, one shaped by music, family, travel, food, plants and the things they have carried with them into this next chapter.
We left with one promise still to keep: next time we are in Brisbane, we are coming to hear Andrew play.
For me, it was one of those homes, and mornings, that stayed with me long after we left.
Explore more from our In Residence series.
Photographer - Louise Roche - The Design Villa
