“If a home has a story, you don’t strip it out. You build with it” The first thing you notice at Lanai, Sarah Parry-Okeden’s newly renovated Avalon Beach home, is the colour. A “tequila sunrise” palette of soft pinks, warm timbers, natural cane and sunset-toned marble runs through the interiors. Even the utility spaces follow the brief: the kitchen’s cane-fronted refrigerator doors, the warm creamy cabinetry, and the marble splashback that rises in a curved silhouette behind the stovetop. Being beachside, the house feels coastal, but not in the predictable sense. “You don’t need decorative shorthand to say ‘coastal,’” Sarah says. “Airflow, light, the way the house opens: that tells the story.”
Sarah, founder of the design studio Wild Orchid Spaces, purchased the property from its longtime owner, who lived…
