The Murano Glass Habit Greg Natale Traces Back to His Uncle’s Living Room

INTERIORS · SYDNEY

Reading time: 7 min

The Greg Natale Gordon House project arrived with almost nothing left of its 1918 character, stripped out by a 1970s renovation decades before he ever saw it. He gutted it a second time, on his own terms, and rebuilt it around parquetry, Calacatta Viola marble, and a family of Murano glass fixtures that trace back to a piece of his own childhood rather than a mood board.

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Introduction

Greg Natale was handed a 1918 Federation bungalow in Gordon, on Sydney’s Upper North Shore, that had already been renovated once, badly, in the 1970s, in a way that had erased almost everything original about it. “When we came on board, none of the Federation character remained,” Natale has said of the house, “and we made the decision to essentially gut the home.” What he built in its place for a family of six is not a restoration in the conservative sense. It is a full rebuild of the house’s character from a different set of references entirely, Italian postmodernism and the colour logic of Memphis Milano, executed with the same parquetry, fluted panelling and custom mouldings a more literal restoration would have used to put the original Federation detailing back.

The house sits alongside a companion piece on this site, a wider conversation with Natale about the design language behind his whole practice, which he and his studio describe as Milanese Maximalism. Gordon House is where that language gets tested against the specific brief of a family home for two adults, four children and two cats, rather than described in the abstract, and it is worth reading as the concrete case for everything discussed there.

A second gutting, on Natale’s own terms

The house’s first renovation, in the 1970s, did the opposite of what a heritage-minded owner would have wanted: it stripped out the Federation detailing rather than preserving it, leaving Natale’s team with a shell rather than a restoration project when they arrived. Rather than trying to reverse-engineer what had been lost, Natale’s studio gutted the interior again and rebuilt its architectural character from scratch, reinstating hardwood parquetry in the entrance foyer, fluted wall panelling through the hallways, and custom mouldings throughout, detailing that reads as historically appropriate to a 1918 house without being a copy of what was actually there before the 1970s renovation removed it.

The exterior tells a different story, and deliberately so. Natale’s team left the original leadlight windows, painted frames, columns and terracotta roof tiles largely as found, keeping the street-facing character of the house understated and legible as a Federation bungalow. That restraint outside is what makes the interior’s shift in register work as a genuine surprise rather than a mismatch: a visitor reads the house correctly from the street, then finds an entirely different set of decisions once they are through the door.

Building a family home around a family of six

The reconfigured plan is organised around a single-storey rear extension, referred to internally as the great room, that houses open-plan living, kitchen and dining space beneath a vaulted ceiling and skylight, along with the primary suite and a nursery on the same level. Three further bedrooms and bathrooms sit upstairs. That layout puts the parents and youngest child on one level and the older children upstairs, a deliberate response to a family of six, two adults and four young children, rather than a generic open-plan brief applied regardless of who was going to live in it.

Colour carries most of the emotional weight of the plan. The great room is built around a merlot-red home bar that anchors the whole open space, paired with white wall units, a burgundy kitchen island and a marble backsplash, with curved cream sofas and timber side tables softening the saturation in the seating area. The primary bedroom takes the opposite approach to the same palette logic, mint green walls against a blue bed frame, a jewel-toned pairing that reads as considered rather than accidental once it is set against the merlot and burgundy used downstairs. Natale has described the guiding brief in plain terms: the clients, both long-time admirers of Italian design, wanted a house built around Italian materials, marble and tile specifically, and “the home never felt pretentious or uninviting” despite the intensity of the palette used to achieve that.

The marble, the tile, and the staircase that carries both

The clearest single demonstration of the material ambition in Gordon House is the staircase, finished in Calacatta Viola marble treads against a postmodern metal balustrade and a purple stair runner, a combination that puts three distinct material languages, veined stone, worked metal and dyed textile, on the same six-metre run without any of them reading as an afterthought. The bathrooms carry the same material confidence into smaller rooms: the primary ensuite pairs mustard and white checkerboard tiling with a timber vanity and terrazzo flooring, while a secondary bathroom is built around a plum vanity, dark red textured walls and a geometric mirror, and a third uses zellige tiling with a citrus-banded ceiling. Each bathroom reads as a distinct colour proposition rather than a variation on the same scheme repeated at a smaller scale, which is a harder brief to execute consistently across an entire house than committing to one palette and holding it throughout.

A collection, not just a fixture

Murano glass appears repeatedly through Gordon House, chandeliers and pendants and sconces recurring across the entrance hall, the primary bedroom and the great room rather than confined to a single showpiece room, and the primary suite’s fixture is a hand-blown chandelier by the Italian designer Gio Ponti, named rather than left as an unattributed decorative object. Natale has explained where that specific material habit comes from directly: “One of my uncles had an extraordinary collection of Murano glass in his home, and I’ve always admired how coloured glass brings such vibrancy.” That is a more precise account of a recurring signature than “the designer loves colour,” since it locates the habit in a specific piece of family history rather than a general aesthetic preference, and it explains why the glass reappears across so many of his projects rather than being deployed once for effect in any single one.

The rooms built for the youngest members of the house

The children’s bedrooms carry the same material confidence as the rest of the house without simply repeating the adult palette at a smaller scale. One bedroom pairs a cobalt velvet headboard with a Murano glass chandelier, extending the house’s signature fixture into a child’s room rather than reserving it for the more formal spaces downstairs. Another uses arch-patterned wardrobe doors finished in dusty rose, a shape that echoes the arched motifs used elsewhere in the house’s joinery, and a third is built around a window seat with a playfully patterned scheme suited to a younger child rather than a scaled-down version of an adult guest room. Treating the children’s spaces as fully resolved design propositions, rather than the part of the brief that gets the leftover budget and a neutral palette, is consistent with the way colour is used everywhere else in the house: intentional, room by room, rather than applied as a single decorating idea repeated throughout.

Outside, the grounds extend the same logic into the garden. The property includes a tennis court and a swimming pool, and a covered outdoor dining patio finished in checkerboard tile connects directly to the great room, extending the same flooring language used inside out into a rust-toned dining setting that functions as a genuine additional room rather than a garden afterthought. For a family of six with two cats, that continuity between the great room and the terrace matters in a way it might not for a couple: it gives the busiest, most lived-in part of the house an outdoor equivalent rather than treating the garden as separate from the everyday spaces.

The studio behind Milanese Maximalism

Natale opened his eponymous Sydney studio in 2001, after five years working at architectural firms including Garth Barnett Designers, HBO+EMTB and SJB, following a design education that ran from TAFE NSW’s Enmore Design Centre through visual arts at Sydney College of the Arts and architecture at the University of Technology, Sydney. A 2002 renovation of a Sydney apartment, in which he coordinated pattern across walls, blinds, linen and artwork as a single unified scheme, established the maximalist approach now recognised globally as Milanese Maximalism, a language he has since set out at length in two books, The Tailored Interior (2014) and The Patterned Interior (2018). Gordon House, more than two decades after that first apartment, applies the same underlying method, pattern and colour coordinated across every surface of a room as one deliberate composition, to a full family house rather than a single interior.

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Final thoughts

A house stripped of its original character by one renovation and then deliberately gutted again by its next designer sounds, on paper, like a story about loss. Gordon House reads instead as a story about what a designer chooses to put back when there is genuinely nothing left to preserve. Greg Natale did not try to reconstruct a Federation interior nobody in the house had ever actually seen. He built a new one, from parquetry and Calacatta Viola marble and a chandelier that shares a lineage with his own family’s glass collection, and left the street-facing exterior exactly restrained enough that the house still reads, correctly, as the 1918 bungalow it always was.