Domain Prestige AFR Magazine “Midnight Marvel”

Featuring Nox Byron Bay

Words by Paul Best // Images by Pacific Media

“Black permeates this Byron hinterland home and forms a canvas on which verdant views and becalming textures are painted.

Black isn’t only back. For Jacqui Pearce, it’s front and centre … and then some.

The newly completed five-bedroom house she and her husband built for their family of five at Talofa, tucked up in the Byron hinterland, is black inside and out: black facades, black interior walls, black joinery, black furniture, black soft furnishings. Move from room to room, and black richly envelops every way you turn.

“I have a real love for New Zealand architecture and that black gabled farmhouse look, with a contemporary vibe,” confesses Pearce, who named the property Nox, Latin for night. “You similarly see it in Belgian farmhouses. It has a real emotive pull.”

First, though, the Brisbane couple had to find the right block, which took a few years of searching in the Northern Rivers. With that box ticked, they approached local practice Davis Architects to build their family home, perched on a hill with sweeping views of lush green countryside.

Initially, they planned to renovate the existing house, an ordinary structure with a pitched roof, but soon realised their dream of dark soaring gables and moody mountain-like lodges required it to be built largely from scratch. “The project evolved,” says principal architect Ed Davis. “It had to be a family home first and foremost” said the project’s design architect Nic Raczka.”

Project credits:

Architects: Nic Raczka (Project Architect for Davis Architects), Ed Davis & Dylan Robinson // Builder: Greg Lyon Constructions // Interiors: Huntress & Hound // Landscapes: Cooke Landscape Architecture & Elemental Gardens // Photography: Pacific Media