At home with Mike and Kerri Potter
It took 8 houses and 20 years, but Mike and Kerri have finally found their home.
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Renovations are hard work. Don’t believe me? Just ask Mike and Kerri, they are experts. Now, after 8 renovations in just 20 years, they have renovated their last house and created their perfect home.
Walking into the Potter’s home my jaw dropped. The contemporary, modern home, filled with earthy touches, was warm, welcoming and absolutely stunning. Builder, and next-door neighbour to Mike and Kerri, Steve Santos from Creative Contractors designed the home that was a finalist in the Master Building ACT 2019 awards in the custom built/ project homes category. Even though Mike and Kerri engaged an award-winning architect, they stayed very involved in the building process. “I love timber floors” Kerri reminisced, standing in her grey scale kitchen. “We’ve had them in most of our houses, [..] but the amount of sunlight coming in [this house] would damage the timber,” so they had to get creative, Utilising the front door, entry patrician, floating stairs, and most strikingly, the patio celling; a light timber flows through from the entry to the backyard.
Everywhere you look in this house there is something that draws your eye. The main living area; an open plan entry, lounge room, dining room and kitchen, is filled with a myriad of perfectly balanced statement pieces. The 90kg, custom made wooden door, the floating wooden steps that flowed from the lounge room and up to the second floor, and the custom cement table from Mitchell Bink concrete design. Individually they are beautiful, but this home is more than just it’s statement pieces, each detail has been delicately thought out, from the light switches to the tiles to create a cohesive flow through the home. Mike made a point of showing me how the kitchen tiles lined up perfectly with the tiles in the patio, it was his favourite spot in the house. With his BBQ at the ready and a stunning timber ceiling, he told me about the first Christmas in their home. “It was beautiful, [..] when you have a party here the whole space can open up, everyone’s in a big shared space but it’s not too crowded.” Mike pulled open the floor to ceiling glass doors: “I like that when I’m in the kitchen I can still talk to Mike or whoever in the patio or the lounge room,” Kerri told me.
After the long process of designing their home, Mike and Kerri brought a team from Impressions Property Styling into their newly finished house to style it, based around art the couple chose. The six weeks of searching for the perfect art paid off, now each room has been styled around the art on display, eight striking art works spread throughout the home, all by an up-and-coming contemporary artist in Sydney, Lara Scolari. The main art in the lounge room/entry “was hanging in Lara’s living room when we went up there,” Mike laughed, they feel in love with it. “You can sit and look at them all day, you can find anything in them,” he pointed out two faces in the abstract lines of one painting, “I call this one Car-Lee after my daughters, see, there’s their faces [..] and then there’s a frog on [one of] the heads.” Hanging in Mike’s open plan study is a piece he calls ‘Annie,’ after his son-in-law’s mother, “she died with brain cancer three years ago, so you see she loved pears so this one’s Annies.”
Mike showed me through his and Kerri’s home and they told me about their lives, but even after I had everything I needed, we sat around their kitchen table and talked. Talked about work, family and our lives, because that’s the kind of people Mike and Kerri are. They’re more than friendly, they’re warm and welcoming: despite the cool tones in their house, Mike and Kerri have made a home that is as warm and welcoming as they are.
