Altus Design Studio

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Balmain, NSW
Altus Design Studio

Sydney based design studio with a passion for colour, texture and pattern. Residential & Small Commercial Interior Design.

10/09/2026

SUNNY SIDE UP | This small bathroom used to be part of a kitchen. Upstairs was a self contained apartment before we started, so a lot has changed.

It was also the first room I designed for these clients, and I went in carefully. You don't know how far someone wants to go, so I held back a little on the colour and the finishes. They came straight back and asked for more, which isn't the feedback you usually get!

So now there's a terrazzo floor, yellow joinery, soft terracotta tiles and a basin with the textural finish of handmade ceramics. Written down like that it sounds like it shouldn't work. Standing in it, it absolutely does.

Generic was never going to be enough for these clients, and I'm glad they told me early.

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Photography Prue Ruscoe⁠
Joinery Homestyle Kitchens⁠
Builder KPL Building

08/09/2026

SUNNY SIDE UP | The first look at our newest project, a beachside home for clients who'd rather throw the windows open and let the sea breeze through than turn the air con on.

The kitchen is where their somewhat unconventional spirit shows most. They didn't want one finish or colour, they wanted lots of them, and they wanted it sunny.

Every tile on its own is a lot, and laid out on the table the samples looked loud. But together in the room, with that big window, the whole space reads as elegantly eclectic rather than busy, and the tiles are nowhere near as bold as they seem in your hand.

It's a big sunshiney kitchen with plenty going on, which is exactly what our clients wanted.

More from Sunny Side Up soon.

Photography Prue Ruscoe⁠
Joinery Homestyle Kitchens
Builder KPL Building

07/09/2026

THE COLOUR EDIT | The brief for Karinya House was a home that felt happy and relaxed, never stiff or formal. Very early on, before building had even started, our clients bought this George Raftopoulos artwork. It told us what kind of house we were making: expressive, colourful, and not afraid of an unexpected combination.

The living room sits directly alongside a greyed off green kitchen, and the obvious move would have been to carry that green through. We didn't want the whole open plan space turning into a variation on one colour, so we broadened it instead. Green stays in the sofa, with dusty pink, ochre and a deep periwinkle blue around it. The artwork was the starting point to play rather than to match.

In a large open plan space, cohesion doesn't have to come from repeating a colour. These all share the same softness, and the timber, natural linen curtains and warm neutrals give them room to breathe.

The colours don't match, they relate. That's what makes a room feel collected rather than coordinated.

03/09/2026

Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the collector’s preview of Sydney Contemporary, immersed in the best of Australian contemporary art. Definitely one of my favourite ways to spend a day!

These are a few of the works that stopped me. Nowhere near an exhaustive list, just the ones I keep thinking about.

Artists and galleries are tagged, apart from the final piece, which is by Sid Pattni Michael Reid Sydney. Instagram has a limit on how many people you can tag and I hit it, which probably tells you something about the afternoon.

Sydney Contemporary opened today and runs until Sunday at Carriageworks. Go if you can, and give yourself more time than you think you’ll need.

01/09/2026

Three levels, one very full agenda. A morning at Putney with our client, going through plans and finishes and watching the house start to make sense. The eighties chrome staircase is on borrowed time!

31/08/2026

Meet Alice. Studio Coordinator. Quiet operator. Dessert sceptic.

Alice has joined us as Studio Coordinator and Design Support, working part-time while she studies Interior Design and makes a career change into the industry.

French by birth, she spent the first five years of her life in Cameroon, her high school years in New York, studied at university in Canada and worked in London before eventually finding her way to Sydney. It's fair to say she brings a fairly international outlook to our Balmain studio.

At Altus, Alice is the one keeping everything moving. Superstar organisational skills, a very good eye for detail, and that rare knack of quietly getting on with things and having them done before anyone thinks to ask.

Outside the studio she's an avid reader and, most remarkably, has no sweet tooth whatsoever, remaining entirely unmoved by the smell of baked goods drifting up from our neighbours at Sandy Bake Shop. Something we're still trying to understand!

27/08/2026

Nobody hires a designer because they can't choose a tile. They hire one because there are five hundred tiles, a twelve week lead time on the one they like, and a builder who needs an answer by Thursday.

It's not the decisions themselves, but the number of them, all connected to each other, none of them pausing because work got busy or someone's home sick.

If you're weighing up whether to take on the reno yourself, that's usually the moment worth a conversation.

24/08/2026

HOMECOMING QUEEN. A home completely transformed by colour. The starting point was restrained neutrals and the end result was warm, personal and unapologetically joyful. ⁠In this room the palette was designed to feel both confident and softly cocooning.⁠ Colour blocking was used to create visual layers, depth, and cohesion between adjacent spaces.

20/08/2026

Behind the photos: four humans, an unreasonable number of cushions and lovely things, a start time we're not going to talk about, and a dog who was fairly sure the entire thing had been arranged for her.

Shoot day at our latest project. Josie, Emily and Alice made it happen. Prue brought her camera and her eye. Billie held the floor.

More from this one very soon.

Photography

18/08/2026

Two turntables, built in.⁠
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Briefs usually talk about storage, and storage is often a polite way of saying you'd like your things out of sight. This one asked for the opposite.⁠
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The joinery was designed to incorporate our client's passion for music rather than it being squeezed in as an afterthought. A small distinction with a completely different outcome.⁠
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HARMONY HOUSE⁠
Joinery by Homestyle Kitchens⁠
Photography by Prue Ruscoe

Address

Balmain, NSW
2041

Telephone

+61400490482

Website

http://www.altusdesignstudio.com.au/

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