Students share their expertise at the 2019 Home Show

Melbourne Polytechnic students and staff will be back at the Home Show again this year – bigger and better than ever before.

Hot on the heels of last year’s huge success with their ‘Ask an Interior Designer’ consultation service, they’ll be back with more stunning sample rooms, more space and more appointment times for the public to pose their interior and home design questions.

Melbourne Polytechnic’s space at the Home Show, which starts on Friday 16 August and runs until Sunday 18 August, will feature a ‘deconstructed home of the future’, a series of stand-alone rooms around a central stage and seating area.

Design Consultations

And while students of Interior Design and Decoration, Built Environment and Building Design will be in their rooms taking walk-up appointments for individual consultations providing free expert styling advice, their teachers – experts in their fields – will be guest speaking and taking questions in an open panel on the stage.

Interior Design and Decoration teacher Linda Bistricic says last year they did only interior design consultations but had so many questions for outside of their area that they invited their building design colleagues to join them over the three days this year.

Full House 

Visitors will be welcomed into the Home Show’s first deconstructed house. The students’ rooms in the contemporary home are:

• Child’s bedroom with the theme of ‘keep going – keep growing’, designed by Maria Conti, Reem Awdeh, Catheryn Magnisalis
• Study, ‘connecting to nature’, by Cintia Spagnol, Eldon Sawyers, Yi-Ning Hsu
• Outdoor room, ‘f i k a’, by Eloise Bonnici, Ebony Fleming, Vitou Horm
• Laundry, ‘the organic harmony of form and function’, by Kim Chandra, Carol Pedraza, Madhu Bala

There will also be two specialised rooms, kitchen and bathroom, designed by professionals and a design studio with the theme of ‘future spaces’ designed by teacher Peter Hogg, which will be used for building-related consultations on anything from structural concerns to permits to architecture. People can bring in their plans, photos and ideas too.

Mud rooms on the rise 

Interior Design and Decoration student Kim Chandra is excited about her show laundry, which features hampers that pull out and a drying cupboard, which looks a bit like a fridge and dries clothes hanging up without tumbling and wrinkling.

There’s also a little mud room, which Kim has noticed is an increasingly popular addition to homes.

As part of her final year studies she’s been thinking about practical designs for organised homes.

‘Lots of families leave all their shoes at the front door and will not have shoes in the house so you’ve got to consider having something to store them,’ she says.

‘There are these mud room setups which are great for organising. It just has to be somewhere where you dump all your bags, your shoes, not necessarily by the front door, it can be somewhere hidden away that’s a bit more stylish.’

Knowledge-based design

Kim says such thinking about design is the favourite part of her studies. She loves ‘learning about design and making your own designs and having that knowledge to base what your designs will be’.

‘You still look at history, you look at previous eras or influences and you come up with something that’s completely unique.

‘And also looking at the trends that are around at the moment, that’s the part I love the most.’ Kim says she always wanted to be an interior designer, but she took detours through life and the workforce before coming back to study.

Life-long passion realised 

‘It’s what I’ve always wanted since I was little, interiors has always been my thing,’ she says. ‘I had to go to church and I would sit there drawing converting it to a house, and I’d go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night and have to draw an idea I’d had. I was really quite obsessed. Even before I bought my first house I would go to open inspections and look at the plans and rearrange rooms and knock down walls.

‘My best friend’s mum did a lot of renovating and she would always bring me in and ask my opinion, she really inspired me as well.’ Kim is set to finish her course in October and can’t wait: ‘I just want to get out there in the workforce as soon as I can.’

In the meantime she’s all set for the Home Show: ‘Because this is my passion I think I’m going to really enjoy it.’