When you build luxury homes for a living, turning that craft on your own family home is a different proposition entirely. There are no clients to manage, no brief to interpret, no compromises to negotiate. Just the unfiltered pursuit of getting every single detail exactly right.
For Shane and Kim Boulter of BBH Projects, that pursuit produced Riverton, their former family home in Chelmer, completed in 2025. Working with Alexandra Buchanan Architecture, they transformed an existing Queenslander into a residence designed to evolve across decades, named in homage to the area’s historic past, and built with the kind of precision that only comes from someone who has spent a career understanding exactly what that means in practice.
“We have always maintained that the best renovations look like they were that way from the start,” Shane reflects. Riverton is exactly that.
The Pink Patagonia Hunt: A Kitchen Story Worth Telling
Every great home has a story at its centre. At Riverton, that story is the kitchen island, and specifically the six-to-eight-month hunt for the Pink Patagonia Quartzite that anchors it.
When the architect specified the stone after spotting it on CDK Stone’s website, Kim fell in love immediately. One problem: no slabs were left. What followed was months of searching across Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne, with nothing quite right, either too dramatic or carrying too much black.
The breakthrough came when CDK Stone’s Lisa headed overseas on a buying trip and tracked down eight pieces that reflected the softer tones and crystalline textures Kim had been chasing. “I had 24 hours to make my selections and pay a deposit,” Kim recalls. No more pieces from this block would ever be available.
The installation, handled by Heritage Stone’s Sam and Harry, became its own exercise in understanding natural material. Internal fissures, bits of copper, a few holes. “Some people expect their stone benchtops to be perfect, but we loved all the imperfections. It’s nature’s artwork,” Kim says. The butterfly book-matched veining on the island worked perfectly. The result is spectacular and irreplaceable.
The Sunken Lounge: Mid-Century Soul in a Contemporary Home
Riverton’s sunken lounge is the kind of space that makes you stop in the doorway. Drawing on the mid-century conversation pit tradition, it’s enveloping, tactile, and deeply human in a way that open-plan living rarely manages.
A central fireplace anchors the space, its frame constructed from 100x100mm steel posts suspended from two 380mm PFCs, with 75mm-thick Hebel mounted onto the frame to ensure the finished tiles aligned perfectly with the edges of the plinth below. The fire’s weight and heat generation required a 1.2m exclusion zone for combustible materials, leading to custom-bronzed metal shelving in place of the originally planned joinery. Every constraint became a design decision.
Opening directly to the garden, pool, and tennis court beyond, the lounge is Kim’s undisputed favourite space in the house. “It lends itself to entertaining in so many ways, and when you’re not entertaining, it’s a peaceful oasis away from the rest of the house.”
The Timber That Isn’t Timber
The curved surfaces in the double-height entry threshold look convincingly like real timber. They’re not. “It’s Laminex TrueScale Woodgrain in blackbutt, a new product released in 2025,” Shane reveals. “Highly realistic without all the downsides of timber veneer.”
Used extensively throughout the home, it creates seamless flow and consistent colour with none of the shade variation that comes with different timber species. Where actual timber does appear, on the internal bridge and external seats, it stands distinctly different by design. The contrast is intentional and entirely coherent.
A Tennis Court That Feels Like Part of the Home
Full tennis courts are rare in Brisbane residential projects, and for the Boulters, it was new territory. “Drainage is what it’s all about,” Shane notes, with a drain running the full length of the court’s boundary side.
More important than the technical execution was the integration. “It was important that the tennis court was part of the house, not a caged destination.” Retractable netting on the house side, fences pushed to boundaries, landscaping butting right up to the court edge. Star jasmine quickly entwines through the black mesh fencing. “Once on the court, it feels like another grassed place for any number of activities.”
Heritage and Contemporary, Held Together
The original house, built in the austerity period and altered throughout its life, presented the renovation challenges that any experienced builder knows to expect and not to underestimate. “It’s not until you’ve completed the demo that you fully understand how much the house is out of square and out of plumb,” Shane reflects. Even the windows they’d hoped to save were termite-ridden.
The exterior retains the period’s materials and finishes, including timber windows and doors, stucco, and timber weatherboards, while new wings extend dramatically outward. Wide glazed openings dissolve the boundaries between the interior and the landscape. Deep eaves and screens manage Brisbane’s subtropical climate without fighting it.
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Standing in the kitchen, Kim says, gives the best view of most of the home’s finest moments at once. “The skylight above the bench, that Pink Patagonia in front of you, the full-height void and bridge leading to the master, the fireplace and sunken lounge. It’s all there.”
For a home built without compromise, that’s exactly the point.
Builder: BBH Projects | bbhprojects.com.au | @bbh_projects
Architecture: Alexandra Buchanan Architecture
Photography: Cieran Murphy
Styling: Tori Waller
