Stylist Steve Cordony shares his top tips for creating a beautiful home this Christmas
In this exclusive extract from his new book Cordony shares his most trusted interior tips and tricks.
I was once quoted as saying, “Styling is the simplest way to make a space ‘feel’ a certain way … The space can be designed to within an inch of its life, but if there is no soul, or representation of the people who live there, then it becomes a showroom”. This is still the mantra by which I live because, in my mind, the most interesting spaces to spend time in are the ones that constantly pique your curiosity. Spaces where there are myriad elements to look at – at once engaging and intriguing, personal and characterful – are what make a house feel like a home.
Today, working as an interior stylist for magazines as well as clients including Ralph Lauren, Wedgwood, French home fragrance house Trudon, Range Rover and Le Creuset, it seems inevitable I should end up obsessed with the interplay of the tiniest details that bring an interior to life. My Italian dad was a builder, my Maltese mum an interior decorator, and I was always around them, either building or renovating something, immersed in colour schemes, floorplans and building sites.
I grew up on the North Shore of Sydney in a heritage-listed house built in 1901. My love for entertaining comes down to these Italian-Maltese roots, where Mum was always cooking, setting the table and styling the house with flowers and candles, while Dad was keeping everyone entertained with outdoor games or projects. Even in my teens, the idea of drawing the best out in a room was ever-present. When Mum and Dad went out for the day, I would take all the furniture out of the lounge – the coffee tables, armchairs, lights, rugs, even the sofas – and I would start again, building up from the bare bones of the room, bringing things back in, one by one, to restyle the entire space.
The funny thing is that even now, whenever I begin working on a new space or restyling a room, I take everything out (that’s within my power to remove, of course) and it’s like a reset, where I start from a blank canvas and build the room up all over again in layers to create different moods. I love mixing classical elements and giving them a contemporary spin. I never want a room to revolve around just one look or theme; I am always trying to mix things up so you can’t pinpoint exactly the era or influence.
In any space I reimagine, I try to add objects, furniture and accessories that complement one another – whether that’s through colour, style or form – yet also contrast so the space never feels one-dimensional.
At home, I combine different textures and finishes, mixing raw linen with velvet, gilt-framed mirrors with antique terracotta vessels, leather with jute, unpolished brass with honed marble, and ebonised furniture with faded antique rugs and timeworn urns. This encourages the eye to travel around a space, moving from one material to the next, appreciating the alchemy of raw and polished, light and shade, ancient and modern, rough and smooth.
My approach to styling a room is always instinctive. While my brain certainly doesn’t work well with numbers, I can walk into any space and, as though I were wearing 3D goggles, know immediately where I would place the furniture and how I would draw it all together. I like imbuing rooms with a sense of scale and grandeur, and I value antiques because they convey such a sense of drama and history with their patina of wear. It seems ironic to me that when I was a teen, I would begrudgingly trudge behind my mum as she dragged me around antique shops at weekends, because now all I do in my spare time is scour markets and websites, like 1stDibs, in search of just the right thing. I love the detailing of an ornate mirror that sits on a mantel, or the carved crest of an armoire, but then I will pare these back by pitching them against an almost brutally stark, white wall and an extremely minimalist contemporary light.
My style lies in this constant tension between scale and proportion, and mixing textures and materials against natural, neutral backdrops so it never feels like there is too much going on in a scheme. I want people to be instantly hit with the emotion of a room before they are able to start unpicking and peeling back its layers.
Despite being surrounded by these ideas of home décor all my life, I didn’t grow up considering interior design as a career. When I was younger, I studied a lot of drama and music, earning a scholarship to The McDonald College of performing arts in Sydney. I later started a degree in industrial design at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), but only lasted six months because it was too maths-heavy and I knew my interest wasn’t in the design of the product itself, but more about how it worked within a space and made someone feel. So I took six months off, working at my sister Amanda’s deli (she’s now food editor at Australian House & Garden and a caterer, specialising in wholesome home cooking), before enrolling in a one-year design fundamentals course at the Design Centre Enmore, home to some of Australia’s best-known design courses. It covered multidisciplinary modules of interior, graphic, jewellery, product and fashion design, and I loved the mix of all those creative genres working together; it’s a frame of mind I still try to access in my work as an interior stylist today.
I moved on to studying interior design for another three years. For my final-year project, I was tasked with reimagining the Carriageworks, a multi-arts urban cultural precinct in Sydney’s inner southern suburb of Redfern, and recognition for this led to me being awarded runner-up in Belle magazine’s prestigious Young Interior Designer of the Year Award and an internship at the magazine. This is where I fell in love with the fast pace of creating whole worlds within a six-metre by six-metre space in just a few hours, before tearing it all down, putting it to one side and starting afresh. I stayed at the magazine for more than five years before striking out on my own in 2014.
I learned how to style homes for interior designers on photo shoots, where I would still pull everything out of the cupboards and the bookshelves to create a clean slate and then bring in furniture to make it look cohesive and special. This proved to be an invaluable experience because I was finding out how interior designers put things together in terms of their own style and theme, and discovered how to add my own spin, while staying true to their ethos and vision.
I love to have a moodboard and a clear plan in place before starting any project. That way everything tends to run smoothly, so I don’t have to go back and forth, redoing things. Maybe it’s how my brain works, but I need that sense of clarity and solid foundation from the beginning; it gives me the confidence to feel my way through the journey with assurance that the end result will be a success. All of this has stood me in great stead for renovating various properties over the past two decades. I learned very quickly that remodelling a home from scratch is a challenging process. It might be easy for me to walk into someone else’s space and make changes, but when it came to Rosedale (the 1887 six-bedroom house I breathed new life into with Michael Booth – a former marketing executive turned horticulturalist – on a 48-hectare farm near Orange in the Central Tablelands of New South Wales), every decision became weighty and significant.
It wasn’t just about aesthetics. It was about timings and budgets, ensuring everything aligned, and staying true to the farmstead’s late 19th-century heritage while introducing contemporary touches. Michael has transformed the grounds into a site of magnificent beauty, including the addition of a vast dam, Italianate pool, several converted outhouses and a nine-hectare paddock with 9000 native trees and plants, as well as an abundant half-hectare vegetable garden at the back of the property. More than 30,000 shrubs, plants and trees have also been planted, including the propagation and cultivation of a selection of English, Japanese and Korean buxus topiary. A few sheep, a small herd of Belted Galloway cattle and two shire horses, also share the property, as well as chickens, ducks, geese, doves, guinea fowl, white peacocks, a camel and two ostriches, Tanaka and Mariah (who had to be raised on a Bondi balcony until spring arrived in Orange). Two English springer spaniels, Bedford and new pup Wrenn, keep them all in check.
Surrounded by so much nature, it’s no surprise that it informs my colour palette, and, to a degree, my textural choices. I never want my interiors to be just one note – one material, one finish, one surface. I like to work in a monochromatic way, using neutrals, but there’s always one pullout colour within every space, usually a bit dirtier in tone. For example, I love shades of green to dance around a room: as a highlight in a patterned fabric, the spine of a book, a glazed Chinese vessel, a plush velvet cushion and foliage in a vase. It instils calmness within a space.
There are designers who deal so confidently with bold colour and vivid pattern, like Australian architects Arent&Pyke or British hotelier and interior designer Kit Kemp, but for me there’s a simplicity and formality to be found working with a palette derived from one base tone that makes a space sing. “I am going to make everything around me beautiful – that will be my life” – this is one of my favourite quotes by the legendary early 20th-century American interior designer Elsie de Wolfe. It might seem a little shallow, but how our homes function and how we feel about ourselves when we are in them has a fundamental impact on our physical health, as well as our mental wellbeing. Throughout every chapter of this book, I have tried to weave useful as well as inspirational ideas about how you can introduce effortless, uplifting moments of joy into every room; from touches of style that give you a little thrill every time you walk by, to arranging furniture, textiles and accessories in a way that entices the very best from each piece as well as the collective whole. Each chapter highlights a different space in the flow through your home, starting right from the moment you or a guest approach the front door. I believe every nook and niche of a room should be celebrated, even those that are often overlooked, such as a hallway or landing.
From the entrance hall through to the living, entertaining and dining areas, to the kitchen and study, bedrooms and bathrooms, and finally the garden, I provide ideas on how to inject any space with some smart, considered styling to create a narrative that harmoniously threads throughout the house. In the living room, I reflect on how this most public space in the home is a showcase for the cumulative memories of who you are and where you’ve been, while the dining room is somewhere I suggest you can be a little more theatrical and have fun with elements that instantly kickstart conversations long before the first course is served.
In the kitchen, one of my favourite rooms in the house, practicality is, of course, key, but it is also about forging a space that is not only nourishing and nurturing for the body but also for the eyes and spirit. Bedrooms are the most intimate of spaces, somewhere to seek comfort and calm, so I examine how to infuse softness and sensuality into rooms dedicated primarily to sleeping, looking at how they can encourage relaxation and rejuvenation as well. In the same way, a bathroom extends that feeling of being a place to seek quiet solace, so I discuss the many things you can do to make it somewhere you can take time to be kind to yourself.
Drawing the shades and textures of nature into every space is always at the heart of my creative process, so naturally the garden is one of my favourite areas to style and spend time in. From creating a place to enjoy languorous lunches, to setting up a little spot for afternoon tea or reading a book, there is so much you can do to extend the look and feel of your interior style into an outside space, whether that’s a tiny terrace or a generous garden with gazebo, pool and sweeping lawn.
Styling, in essence, is the cherry on the top of what makes a room unique. It is the editing of all those key elements – curating the special pieces of furniture, the objects found on your travels, the accessories that lend personality and charm – that ensures your attention within a room remains rapt. If my life’s purpose is helping people transform their homes into little worlds that reflect their personalities and resonate with all the journeys they have been on in life, then I’m happy with that. I’m never going to be a brain surgeon, but making things pretty – that I can do.
I love bringing people into my world, sharing with them the thought processes behind the whys and hows of my style DNA, whether that is creating a new vignette at home in Rosedale (probably too regular an occurrence; I’m not someone who is good at sitting still), hosting a Steve Cordony Masterclass in the garden, or styling a shoot for one of the many brands I am lucky to work with. No one day is ever the same, which is both exhausting and thrilling, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. Most importantly, whether it is through my Instagram feed (or whatever platform is invented in the future), or in the pages of this book, what I hope people will truly understand is the essence of what I strive to achieve in any interior – creating an intangible, metaphysical and captivating emotion that you can’t quite put your finger on, but in which lies the true magic of any distinctly personal inviting and unforgettable space.
This is an edited extract from Moments at Home: Interior Inspiration for Every Room (Hardie Grant). Available in stores nationally and online from February 6, 2025.
This story is from the December issue of WISH.
