As featured in Australian House & Garden
Some homes arrive all at once.
This one was made to reveal itself slowly.
Shotton Lodge came to us after four years of false starts. The family of five had spent the better part of a decade trying to reshape their home, moving through consultants and builders without the project ever quite leaving the ground. By the time they reached Wilhaus, morale was low and the work had stalled. What they needed first was for someone to take the weight of it — to bring design and construction back under one roof and give them a clear line to budget, timing and the home at the end of it. That joined-up way of working is the reason Wilhaus exists: interior designer Amy Spargo of Maine House Interiors and builder William McKenna of Wilken Homes, brought together as one studio. Shotton Lodge was the first project to carry our name.
The house had barely changed since it was built in 1978. Behind the red brick and timber-lined ceilings was a floorplan that worked against family life — a warren of small rooms with little connection between them. The brief was for something robust but elegant; open, yet never sparse. A home that could take the daily traffic of a busy household of five and still feel generous. Storage mattered. So did a sense of zones — places to gather, and places to slip away.
Working to plans by Trenergy Design, we opened the home up. New ensuites and a powder room were drawn into the layout, along with a proper entry — storage cupboards and a built-in bench seat, the kind of threshold a family actually lives through. Ceiling heights became a tool rather than a given: in the living room, the ceiling was lifted from 2.4 to four metres, bringing a sense of presence and proportion that feels luxurious without ever losing its warmth.
The kitchen sits at the heart of it all — warm timber joinery, a microcement-wrapped rangehood, and a long island topped in Nero Assoluto granite, as suited to a quiet weeknight as to a full table of guests. Beside it, the dining area is anchored by a steel-framed window framing the kitchen garden and paddocks, with sliding doors opening onto a sun-drenched deck. Windows — some kept, some new — do much of the quiet work here. They're what let the home unfold gradually: from the pitched entry, past the living room's picture window to the lake, and around to the kitchen, where the view opens to the pool, the garden and the grazing horses and cows past it.
Inside, layers of natural timber, stone and brass settle against the family's own furniture, lifted with touches of green, soft pink and blue, tufty rugs and billowing curtains. The owners grew up in the UK with a love of English farmhouses and Belgian barns, and that sensibility meets the Australian landscape — the surrounding gums, the lake, the gardens — in a way that feels entirely at home. Outside, a rendered exterior in Taubmans Black Fox lets the house settle into its rural pocket of the Mornington Peninsula, while a new deck, pergola and landscaping by Longview Landscapes draw it out into the paddocks. Even the original pool was kept and made over, new tiles, coping and sandstone paving bringing it comfortably into the setting.
It's a home that connects a family to each other and to the place they live. For us, it was the perfect way to begin.
