This airy North Perth home reimagines ’60s migrant architecture for a new era

North Perth is filled with retro Mediterranean homes – there’s hardly a street you can walk down without spying a few archways or a concrete lion or two.

And while we adore the kitsch fun of some psychedelic carpet or a technicolour paved terrace… Sometimes an update is needed.

And who better to undertake that update than Whispering Smith? Based in South Fremantle, the female-led architecture practice specialises in sustainable design and what they characterise as “friendly minimalism”.

In 2020, the team at Whispering Smith founded New Resident: a sustainable developer dedicated to finding sites with character homes with mature trees and saving them – gently coaxing them into a new era while maintaining their charm and preserving vital suburban tree canopy.

Named after its original Italian owner, Annita’s House is the latest project from the Whispering Smith x New Resident studio – and it’s now up for grabs!

Just five minutes walk from Fitzgerald Street (a clear path to Satchmo coffee and bagels each morning!), Annita’s House was a classic North Perth home from the ’60s.

A major element of its redesign included reorienting the home’s main living and kitchen areas to benefit from the home’s north-east orientation – as well as the mature mango tree in the front garden.

The result is a vast, airy space at the front of the home that channels its Mediterranean spirit while reflecting a contemporary lifestyle – particularly through materiality choices like the custom marble flooring created from bench top and quarry offcuts. It’s North Perth living by way of Mediterranean courtyard!

The kitchen itself melds sleek and contemporary with timeless practicality and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of easy hospitality. After all, what’s more hospitable than chatting with your dinner guests while they relax on the bench seat with a drink, enjoying the gentle breeze from that open window?

Four bright bedrooms continue to the other end of the home, with the largest at the rear. While the ensuite and built in storage is attractive enough on its own, the huge windows opening to the rear verandah are – at least in our eyes – the biggest delight, particularly when you factor in the mature grape vines that was rescued from Annita’s original garden.

(New landscaping was undertaken with the guidance of sustainable landscape architecture firm See Design Studio, utilising waterwise natives and low mow lawns.)

Fallen in love? Check out the listing for Annita’s House (23 Norfolk Street, North Perth) here!