Australian jewellery designer Millie savage is known for her colourfully quirky jewellery designs, but her house takes her unique style to the next level. Pouring her extraordinary creativity into her Victorian farmhouse, the result is something you genuinely have to see to believe.
Giving Johanna Griggs a tour of her home, Millie shares one of her big colour design secrets.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Oh my God, your house is so crazy, it’s so rainbow,'” Millie laughs. “And it is, but if you look at each space separately, it’s actually only two colours and a few little accent elements.”
That’s Millie’s design secret in a nutshell: complementary contrasting colours, grouped with intention rather than scattered at random.
Here’s a quick look Inside (and out) of Millie Savage’s place.
Inside Millie Savage’s Victorian farmhouse
The goat tower
Don’t expect to see any garden gnomes or a cute letterbox, no – Millie has an architectural goat tower, that she designed herself, rising out of the paddock like a tiny medieval fortress for her very lucky animals.
The pink and green kitchen
Millie’s kitchen is a joyful riot of pink and green. But the real showstopper is the crystal shelf.
“I went to the Museum of Natural History in New York, and I was walking around, and I saw all the crystals there,” Millie says. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s so amazing. How do I put that in my house?”
The gate (yes, she welded it herself)
Before you even get inside, there’s the gate, an intricate, sculptural masterpiece that Millie made herself.
“I went down to Dave Allison at Rosebud Engineering for two days, and he taught me how to weld,” she explains, with the casual energy of someone describing a weekend hobby rather than a feat of craftsmanship.
“It was really fun, because there was leftover green onyx from inside the house, and I smashed it up and realised – it’s like making a giant ring. You have to bend and make the bezel for the bead of stone.”
The sunken lounge (and those lights)
If there’s one room in Millie’s house that stands out, it’s the lounge room, specifically, the sunken conversation pit that anchors the entire space.
Sunken lounges are having a serious moment right now. Featuring a custom-made couch so soft and floppy it looks like it’s melting into the floor, Millie’s version is the stuff interior design dreams are made of.
“When I got the couch custom-made, I was like, ‘How do we make it really floppy?'” Millie explains. “So I designed a doona that velcros on. It’s actually a leather doona over the top of the couch. That’s why it’s so soft and bouffy.”
The lights: Leisa Warrington’s blown glass magic
Above the pit, suspended like a fever dream of colour and glass: the lights. Created by Millie’s friend and glass blower Leisa Warrington, they are, in Millie’s own words, “probably my favourite thing in the house.”
Warrington also created the extraordinary blown-glass pendant hanging outside Millie’s home.
A purple bath in the bedroom
Millie has one non-negotiable when it comes to her bedroom: there must be a bath.
“I am obsessed with baths. I bathe twice a day,” she says simply. “I love having a bath in the middle of my room.”
The bath, custom-made in purple, sits in the corner of the main bedroom, paired with contrasting green onyx tiles.
The garden: a fairytale in rooms
The garden is a collaboration between Millie and her best friend, landscape designer Colin Hyett.
Hyett, who has spent over two decades as a landscape designer on the Mornington Peninsula, has transformed the property into a series of distinct garden “rooms,” each with its own mood, colour palette and texture.
“It needed to be segmented into rooms,” Colin explains. “Colours and textures, and sort of moods as well.”
There’s the glasshouse garden, centred on a sculptural mushroom installation that Millie designed and had shipped to the property two years before the rest of the garden caught up with it.
There’s the kitchen garden. And then there’s the bathtub garden: a lush, planted bouquet of thousands of bulbs, pitched to Colin with a single word.
“The pitch was Wizard of Oz,” Millie says.
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