Inspired by an Italian interior we'd seen in a magazine we set ourselves the goal
of creating a space that felt like a rustic vineyard.... a warm space to sit and sip wine.












Maria's obsession with multipurpose boxes began about 15 years ago when she used
to visit Japanese style cafes in Melbourne laneways on her lunch break and sit on
stools made from plywood boxes. She loved the fact that they could be sat on, used
as tables or stacked for wall units. With a small collection of her own vintage boxes
scattered around her house used for all sorts of storage needs, she was taken back
in awe when she spotted an Italian interior using similar boxes. A quick phone call
(well they're never really that quick) to Rachael (who religiously purchases the
same magazine) got the creative juices going and set Rachael on a mission to find
as many boxes as possible. We found 40 vintage boxes in Melbourne and 40 in rural
Victoria that all matched which would be perfect for our vision.... the only problem
now was attaching them together as they were slightly smaller than our original idea
and needed to be fixed together to ensure they were going to be safe stacked. A trip to
Bunnings and an extremely helpful salesperson (who are rare and almost extinct) we
came back with an extraordinary amount of brackets, screws and a new drill. We
proceeded to fix the boxes together in the configuration we'd designed (that took
probably 5 times longer that we had originally anticipated) and put them in place.
Our room was starting to take shape.












We'd purchased an extremely heavy duty trestle table shortly after we sold an antique
trestle table 12 months earlier and found another shortly after that in Queensland that
had been delivered with other items for our previous room. We decided we probably
didn't need to hold onto both and one of them would fit in our vineyard room perfectly.
The legs had been previously painted in a mid brown so we decided to paint them
black to give the table a freshen up.... little did we know that this would start a revolution
of black legged trestle tables appearing in their hundreds (well, not quite) on ebay.












The black antique cafe chairs, that also traveled down from Brisbane, were kindly hand
painted by Stu to match the black legs of the trestle table and looked simply stunning
around the amazing looking trestle table (we were really starting to not want to let it go).
Maria's Nana's black cupboard that was used in our 8th room and hadn't sold looked
just perfect at the end of the room... Combined with the industrial chair, a rustic antique
table and 2 antique painted stools, this room was quickly becoming our favourite and
our hardest to part with so far....