Amara Homestead Featured in Australian House & Garden
There are projects that stay with you long after the installation is complete. Amara Homestead in Burradoo, NSW is one of them.
We are proud to share that this project has been featured in the September 2026 issue of Australian House & Garden, photographed by Dave Wheeler and styled by Laura Rees. For those of us who worked closely on it, seeing it in print is a quiet kind of validation - confirmation that what we felt in the rooms, we were right to feel.
Amara Homestead began as a modest renovation brief and evolved, as the best projects do, into something far more considered. The existing double-brick home in Burradoo was retained at its slab and general footprint, but substantially redesigned and extended by GUD Studio to suit the needs of a family who knew exactly how they wanted to live. Tasker Constructions executed the build. VICELLO was engaged for the joinery design consultation, manufacture, and installation - working closely with the homeowner, Dianne, from the earliest stages of the brief.
Dianne brought to this project something rare: a clear design conviction and the confidence to act on it. As the project manager of her own home, she handpicked every trade, assembled her references with precision, and arrived at every conversation knowing what she wanted and why. Our role was to meet that clarity with equal rigour, to refine the joinery direction, resolve the practical requirements of each space, and deliver cabinetry and stone that felt cohesive across the entire home.
The heart of the home is what Dianne calls the Great Room; an open-plan kitchen, dining, and living space anchored beneath soaring vaulted ceilings that give the whole volume an almost cathedral quality. It is a generous, light-filled space, and the joinery brief for it was clear: beautiful, but not fussy. Rich, but functional. This is a family home, and it needed to work.
The kitchen joinery is painted in Dulux Beige Royal Quarter, a warm cream tone that sits quietly against the limewashed walls. Arabescato Vagli stone runs from benchtop to full-height splashback, with a curved rangehood clad in soft Venetian plaster overhead. The island carries a bullnose marble edge and a reeded base detail, a nod to a European sensibility without quoting it directly. Storage was designed for genuine daily use: wide drawers for pots, shallow drawers above the Bertazzoni Heritage cooker for utensils, and the Liebherr fridge, freezer, dishwasher and waste systems all concealed within the joinery.
GUD Studio gave us a remarkable architectural canvas. We took it from there.
What makes Amara Homestead feel resolved rather than assembled is the consistency of its material language. The same polyurethane door profile, the same aged bronze hardware, the same tonal palette of bone and warm cream; these decisions repeat from the kitchen through to the butler's pantry, the laundry, and the ensuite, giving the home a strong sense of continuity without ever feeling repetitive.
The butler's pantry, which Dianne was initially uncertain about, has become one of the most used spaces in the home. Timber open shelving sits against the Arabescato Vagli splashback, making it a hardworking zone for daily food prep without sacrificing the warmth of the wider interior.
In the laundry, joinery painted in Porter's Paints Volcanic Ash and Lorde White marble benchtops provide a considered point of difference, the same design intelligence, expressed in a different register.
As Victoria noted in the H&G feature: "What is most successful about this project is that it doesn't feel like a single statement moment. The repetition of colour, profile, stone, hardware and texture across the home gives the project a strong sense of continuity, while the practical details make it personal to the homeowners."
The September 2026 issue of Australian House & Garden is available now. The feature, titled White Wings, was written by Stephanie Hope and runs across eight pages of Dave Wheeler's exceptional photography.
Amara Homestead, Burradoo, Southern Highlands NSW. Architecture: GUD Studio. Construction: Tasker Constructions. Photography: Dave Wheeler. Styling: Laura Rees. Joinery: VICELLO.
