Interior designer Melbourne: a Gold Coast studio working Australia-wide

Luxxe Interiors is a Gold Coast interior design studio led by Tammy Brazel, designing residential interiors for clients across Australia, including Melbourne, since 2019.

We want to be straight with you from the first paragraph, because most pages like this one are not. Our studio is on the Gold Coast. We do not have a Melbourne office, and we have not yet completed a named Melbourne project. What we offer instead is a way of working that does not depend on postcode: design led from our studio and delivered through 3D renders, virtual reality walkthroughs, complete drafting packages and site visits scheduled around the moments that matter. We delivered the Lindfield build and the Blakehurst project in Sydney this way, along with work in Brisbane and Mackay, and the method holds for a house in Toorak just as well as it does for one in Runaway Bay.

Most people searching for a Melbourne interior designer assume the designer has to live within driving distance of the site. For a decorator dropping in weekly with cushions, perhaps. For considered residential design, the real work happens in drawings, schedules and models long before a trade sets foot on site. That work travels.

How design from the Gold Coast reaches a Melbourne home

Every project starts with a long conversation. Tammy takes the brief herself: how you live, what the house does badly now, what you need it to do in five years. You send plans, photos and measurements, or measured drawings of the existing conditions are produced as part of the drafting scope.

From the brief comes a concept, and from the concept come the 3D renders. This is where distance stops mattering. You see your actual rooms, your joinery, your stone and your lighting, rendered accurately enough to make real decisions against. For larger projects we build a virtual reality walkthrough, so you can stand in the kitchen and check the sightline to the garden before a single cabinet is ordered. This is usually the point where the project stops feeling abstract.

Then comes documentation. Your builder and joiner receive a full drafting package: plans, elevations, joinery details, finishes schedules, electrical and lighting layouts. Good documentation lets a Melbourne builder price accurately and build exactly what was designed, without ringing the designer every second day to ask what a drawing meant. It is the least glamorous part of interior design, and it is the part that decides whether the finished house matches the renders.

Site visits are scheduled, not ad hoc. They land at the stages where being in the room changes the outcome, and the number of visits is agreed in your proposal before we begin, so travel never turns up as a surprise. Samples travel too. Stone, timber, fabric and paint arrive by courier as a sample box, and when a piece matters enough to sit on before you commit, we send you to the maker's Melbourne showroom.

What we design

Full home interior design is the centre of the studio's work: whole houses and apartments resolved as one scheme rather than a run of disconnected rooms. Within that sit the rooms that carry the most decisions. We design kitchens, bathrooms and laundries down to joinery detail. We design home cinemas and bars, rooms that reward careful planning of lighting and cabinetry more than almost any other. The studio also takes on decoration and furnishing, home renovations, drafting as a standalone service, and collaboration on new builds alongside your architect and builder.

Luxxe Interiors brings a defined design language without forcing one identical scheme onto every house. Sculptural stone, custom furniture, tailored joinery and layered light recur, but the architecture still leads. Brighton and bayside briefs often lean coastal classic; if that sounds like yours, our Hamptons style interior design page shows how we handle the look without the clichés. Armadale and South Yarra briefs sit differently: period shells with contemporary interiors, where the architecture does some of the talking and the joinery has to be invented rather than bought.

The Melbourne this page is written for

Substantial residential projects in Melbourne concentrate in a familiar band, and each part of it asks something different of a designer. Toorak means large blocks, ambitious rebuilds and whole home scope, exactly the kind of project where full documentation earns its keep. Brighton is bayside light and family houses, kitchens that open to gardens and pools, and briefs that balance polish against the reality of children and sand. Armadale and South Yarra are Victorian and Edwardian stock: terraces, villas and apartments where heritage fabric meets contemporary living and storage has to be designed into the bones. Apartment work is familiar territory for the studio. The Aria Penthouse sits in our portfolio for a reason, and a good share of the best South Yarra and Toorak addresses are apartments and penthouses with exactly those constraints.

One more thing distance makes us take seriously. Melbourne's light is not Queensland's. Winters are longer, the light sits cooler, and a palette that sings in a Gold Coast pavilion can feel thin in a south facing Brighton living room in July. Testing colour and material under the room's own light conditions is precisely what the render stage exists for, and it is a discipline we apply to every interstate project rather than an afterthought.

The work we can show you

We will not pad this section. There is no Luxxe Interiors project in Melbourne yet, and you should be wary of any interstate studio that implies otherwise. What we can show is a body of work that includes projects designed and delivered at distance. The Lindfield build and the Blakehurst project, both in Sydney, ran on renders, drafting packages and scheduled visits. So did a Brisbane renovation and a project in Mackay, a long way up the Queensland coast from our studio.

Closer to home, Casa Laguna, the Aria Penthouse, Villa Oceana, the Sovereign Island renovation and the Carrara new build show the standard the studio holds when the site is twenty minutes away. The point of listing both groups is simple: the interstate work and the local work look like the same studio. Judge that yourself through the portfolio on our interior designer Gold Coast homepage, then read about the Sydney projects on the interior designer Sydney page and the Brisbane work on the interior designer Brisbane page. Client reviews sit on hipages rather than curated on our own site, which is where we would rather you read them.

What Melbourne projects are worth protecting

The scale of spending explains why documentation matters. Australians had $1.32 billion of alterations and additions to residential buildings approved in June 2026 alone, according to the ABS Building Approvals release. And the Houzz & Home Australia study put the national median renovation spend at $30,000 in 2021, up 43 per cent on the year before, with the top tenth of renovating households planning budgets around $138,000. Projects in Toorak and Brighton routinely sit well beyond those medians.

At that level of spend, the expensive mistakes are not fee related. They are the benchtop ordered in the wrong stone, the joinery that arrives 40mm proud of the fridge, the pendant centred on a kitchen island that later moved. A designer's job is to make sure the money buys the intended result once. Renders and drawings make mistakes cheap, because on screen they cost a revision instead of a rebuild.

Process and timeline

The sequence is the same whether the site is in South Yarra or next door to the studio.

1. Discovery and brief. A detailed conversation about how you live, plus plans, photos and measurements of the site.

2. Concept. Direction for the whole home: layout thinking, palette, the big moves.

3. Design development. 3D renders, the VR walkthrough on larger projects, and courier sample boxes until the scheme is settled.

4. Documentation. The full drafting package your builder and joiner will price from and build from.

5. Procurement and decoration. Furniture, lighting, fabric and art, sourced and tracked to installation.

6. Site visits and styling. Scheduled trips at the milestones agreed in the proposal, through to the final styling layer.

On timing, honesty beats optimism. A single room can move through design in a matter of weeks. A full home usually takes some months from brief to a complete documentation set, and renovation or new build work then runs to the builder's programme, not the designer's. We would rather tell you that now than surprise you in month three.

How fees work

We will not publish numbers a website cannot promise, but the model is simple to explain. Australian designers generally charge in one of three ways: an hourly rate, a percentage of the project cost, or a fixed fee scoped by stage. Our proposals are written so the scope is explicit stage by stage, which means you can stop at documentation and hand the package to your own builder, or carry on through procurement and styling with us. Travel for Melbourne site visits is set out in the same proposal, agreed before anything begins. Scoping this way also makes quotes comparable, because you can see exactly what each stage contains and what it would cost to leave out. [CONFIRM: minimum engagement figure]

Designer or decorator: which one you actually need

Half the searches that land on this page say "interior designer Melbourne" and the other half say "interior decorator Melbourne", and they are not the same job. A decorator works with the room as it stands: furniture, colour, window treatments, styling. A designer changes the room itself, through layout, joinery and documentation that trades can build from. If your South Yarra apartment needs furnishing, that is decoration, and we offer it. If your Armadale terrace needs the back half rethought, that is design. Most of our full home projects move through both, in that order, under one scheme.

Questions Melbourne clients ask

Do you have an office in Melbourne?

No. Luxxe Interiors works from a Gold Coast studio and delivers Melbourne projects through 3D renders, VR walkthroughs, drafting packages and scheduled site visits. You will always know in advance exactly when we will be on site.

How do site visits work from interstate?

The number and timing of visits is agreed in the proposal and coordinated with your builder's programme, so trips land at the stages where presence changes the outcome rather than at random. Between visits, decisions run on renders, documentation and courier samples.

How much does an interior designer cost in Melbourne?

There is no honest single number, in Melbourne or anywhere else. Designers charge hourly, as a percentage of project cost, or as a fixed fee per stage, and the fee follows the scope. We set ours out in a written proposal after the brief, stage by stage, before you commit to anything.

Can you work with a builder or architect we have already engaged?

Yes. Collaboration on new builds is part of the studio's regular work, and our drafting packages are written for other professionals to price and build from. We slot into an existing team rather than asking you to rebuild it around us.

Can you design a single room, like a kitchen or a home cinema?

Yes. Kitchens, bathrooms and laundries are a core specialty, designed to joinery level, and home cinema and bar design is one of the studio's favourite briefs. Single room scope follows the same process as a full home, just shorter.

How long does the design phase take?

A single room can be designed in weeks. A full home generally takes some months to reach a complete documentation set, and we will give you a project specific timeline in the proposal once the scope is clear. Build timelines then belong to your builder, and we aim to document early enough that design decisions are never the reason a Melbourne site stands idle.