Madagascar House

The entrance sets you up for everything that follows. A sculptural bronze door — deeply textured, worked in relief — is the first thing you see, and it tells you exactly what kind of home this is going to be.

The White Project Co. have designed the approach as carefully as the interior. Curved white render walls, a stone garden with cacti and native groundcover, that door as the focal point. Step inside and a brass sconce glows beside an arched plaster niche in the entry hall. It is a considered beginning.

The staircase spirals upward — stone, with nosings edged in brass — and leads you through the house with the same quiet confidence you feel in every room. The main living area has a curved sofa in warm wheat beside the marble staircase landing. An adjacent sitting room has a rust orange curved sofa facing a white beaded chandelier. Both feel easy, nothing overdone.

The kitchen is the room where the material story becomes most legible. Travertine stone covers the island and splashback in one continuous run, floor to ceiling, behind a copper rangehood that sits there like it was always meant to. A brass pot rail spans the cabinetry. Warm timber joinery on the perimeter. The room functions as cleanly as it reads.

Upstairs, a bedroom clad in bookmatched chevron marble is the quiet showstopper. It is the kind of room that stays with you.