Waverley
A bathroom project at Bellerive on Hobart’s eastern shore, designed with Darkitecture — bold stone and joinery, delivered with meticulous site work in an occupied home.
The brief
A wet area with real presence. Darkitecture’s design leans on stone and joinery doing the talking rather than fittings, which puts every load on execution: if the material is the feature, the setting-out has nowhere to hide.
The build
Bathrooms are where a builder’s tolerances become visible. A tiled floor has to fall correctly to the waste without ever reading as a slope. Stone has to meet joinery without a shadow gap doing the apologising. Tapware has to land exactly where the setout said it would — and plumbing rough-in happens months before anyone sees a finished wall, so an error there is discovered far too late to be cheap.
Bold stone compounds all of it. Large-format and heavily veined material has to be laid out as a composition before a single piece is cut, so the veining runs where the designer intended rather than wherever the slab happened to fall. That is planning work, and it happens well before the tiler arrives.
Then there is the part that does not show in a photograph: this was done in a home people were living in. Dust control, protecting finished areas, sequencing so the household keeps a functioning bathroom, and leaving a site tidy every single evening because it is somebody’s house rather than a building site. Clients notice that more than they notice the joinery.
The result
A resolved, confident room — and a renovation the owners could live through.
See The Curve, also at Bellerive and winner of HIA Tasmania’s Bathroom of the Year for 2025, our other bathroom projects, or how we approach bathroom renovations. Photography by Tassie Visuals.
