Some of the best interiors being designed right now are not choosing between old and new. They are borrowing from both. Heritage inspired interiors have moved well past faithful period reproduction, and the result is rooms that feel grounded and characterful without feeling like a museum. Getting there is mostly a question of judgement, and a lot of it comes down to paint.
Where classic meets contemporary
A recent Darlinghurst project is a good illustration. In a Sydney penthouse featured by Vogue Living, interior designer Michael Allsopp drew on the view over St Mary’s Cathedral and the weather rolling across the harbour, then set that against mid-century modern references inside. Gothic architecture outside the window, clean modernist lines within.
On paper that combination should not work. It does, because the heritage influence is used as inspiration rather than instruction. Nothing in the apartment is pretending to be old. The palette and the mood take their cue from something historic, and everything else stays firmly contemporary. That is the whole trick, and it scales down to an ordinary house just as well as it works in a penthouse.
Let the building lead the colour
Western Australia has more period housing stock than people tend to realise. The State Register alone holds more than 1,300 places, and the inHerit database records over 23,000 heritage places across the state, on top of all the Federation, interwar, and post-war homes in suburbs like Mount Lawley, Subiaco, and Fremantle that carry the character without carrying a listing.
If your home already has period bones, they will tell you what to do. Deep skirtings, picture rails, ceiling roses, fretwork, and sash windows were all designed to be seen, and the older colour palettes that suited them tend to be richer and more saturated than the neutrals we default to now. You do not have to reproduce a Federation scheme exactly. Pull one or two colours out of it, use them with a modern hand, and let the rest of the room stay quiet.
The mistake we see most often is treating every original detail as equally important. Picking out every moulding in a contrasting colour turns a room busy in a hurry. Choose the feature worth celebrating, give it the contrast, and let everything else recede.
Finishes do the quiet work
Sheen level is the detail that separates heritage inspired interiors that land from ones that feel slightly off, and almost nobody thinks about it. A full gloss on trim and joinery reads traditional straight away, because that is what was used. Drop to a low sheen or matt on the same trim, in the same colour, and the room reads modern. The colour has not changed at all, only the way it handles light.
That gives you a genuinely useful lever. You can run a period-accurate colour through a room and keep it feeling current by staying with contemporary finishes, or go the other way and use a modern colour in a traditional gloss to nod at the building’s age. Wallpaper works the same way when it is used in one considered spot rather than everywhere, which is why it has come back so strongly.
Older surfaces also need more from the preparation than new ones do. Layers of previous paint, original plaster, and timber that has moved over a century all behave differently, and anything painted before the 1970s may contain lead, which changes how the surface has to be handled. Preparation is where a heritage job is won or lost, and it is not the place to save a day.
Getting the balance right
Blending classic and contemporary is not about splitting the difference. It works when one voice leads and the other supports, and when the old details are treated as something to enhance rather than copy. Our team has spent years on exactly this kind of work, enhancing traditional features and preserving them for future generations, and you can see the results in our heritage projects.
If you have a period home you want brought forward without losing what makes it worth keeping, we would be glad to talk it through. Have a look at our heritage building services or get in touch for a free quote.
