Residential Interior Design and Decoration in Sydney
Kaiko Design Interiors is a Sydney studio specialising in residential interior design for clients who want more than a surface-level refresh. We design homes from the ground up and we redesign them from the inside out.
Led by Nic Kaiko, whose career spans luxury hotel design and luxury residential projects across Australia and internationally, the studio brings a level of design rigour and documentation to residential work that most studios reserve for much larger commercial projects. The result is homes that feel considered at every scale from the spatial planning to the handle height.
Our residential portfolio spans Sydney and beyond: terrace houses in the inner east, apartments in the lower north shore, large family homes on the upper north shore and coastal properties along the NSW coast. Each project begins with the same question: how does this person actually want to live? We build on the answer together from there.
We work with clients in person across Greater Sydney and remotely throughout New South Wales and Australia.
Recent residential projects
Each project below represents a different brief, a different architecture and a different client. What they share is the same design methodology: a clear concept, meticulous documentation and an interior that could only ever belong to the person who commissioned it.
Where we work
Our residential projects are concentrated across Sydney's established suburbs, where heritage architecture, harbourside apartments and substantial family homes each demand a different design response. Read more about our work as an interior designer on the Lower North Shore, in the Eastern Suburbs, across the Upper North Shore and throughout North West Sydney.
What Sets the Studio Apart
Three things shape how we work, and they are worth understanding before you engage any studio.
The first is fixed-fee pricing. Before creative work begins, you receive a proposal setting out the scope, the deliverables and the exact design fee, structured across defined stages with progress payments tied to each. Most Sydney studios bill hourly or as a percentage of construction cost. Both models leave the total unknown until the project is well underway. Ours does not, and the discipline of fixing a fee means the scope has been thought through before anyone starts billing for it. Our interior design pricing sets out each stage in full.
The second is meticulous documentation. Clients rarely see the drawing set, but builders do, and it is where a project is either protected or exposed. Thin documentation produces variations on site: queries mid-build, decisions made under pressure, costs that climb because something was not specified clearly enough. We document joinery, finishes, lighting and trade coordination in full before a project goes to tender. That work is why our projects tender accurately.
The third is colour. Our philosophy of dynamic eclecticism means colour-led interiors built around the client and the building rather than a repeatable studio template. It is why a heritage terrace and a harbourside apartment can both come out of this studio looking nothing alike and still feel like the same hand resolved them.
Projects We Take On
Our work is full-service and whole-home. That usually means a ground-up build, a full renovation, or a substantial reconfiguration of an existing house or apartment, with the interior resolved from spatial planning through to furniture and decoration.
We are not the right studio for a single room in isolation, a standalone bathroom or a patio. Those briefs are better served elsewhere, and saying so early saves everyone time.
The projects that suit us best are ones where decisions genuinely matter: joinery that gets built once, a floor plan that dictates plumbing and electrical runs, a heritage overlay that shapes what is possible. That is where design rigour earns its fee. Our guide to the interior design process in Australia sets out what each stage involves and when.
Starting your project.
The first step is a conversation. Tell us about your home, your brief and your timeline — we'll come back to you with an honest assessment of how we can help and what it's likely to involve.
What we do
Full home interior design From a ground-up architectural build to a whole-home renovation, we manage the full scope of the interior — spatial planning, documentation, material selections, furniture and decoration. Every stage is managed under a fixed fee, with deliverables and progress payments clearly outlined before work begins.
Renovation and refurbishment Whether you're reconfiguring a floor plan, updating a kitchen and bathrooms or reworking a tired interior to suit a new chapter of life, we bring the same level of design thinking to renovations as we do to new builds. Good renovation design resolves what isn't working spatially while honouring what is.
Apartment interior design Apartments present a particular design challenge: fixed architecture, limited natural light and the constant negotiation between storage, openness and personality. We have extensive experience designing Sydney apartments across a wide range of buildings, periods and price points.
Heritage and character homes Sydney's terrace houses, federation homes and other heritage home renovations are some of the most rewarding spaces to work with — and the most unforgiving if handled clumsily. We understand the material language of these buildings and how to introduce contemporary living without erasing what makes them special.
Colour consultation and interior decoration For clients whose architecture is settled but whose interiors need direction — a considered colour palette, furniture selections, window furnishings and the final layers of decoration — we offer a focused decoration service tailored to the scope required.
What It Costs and How Long It Takes
Design fees for a full residential engagement typically sit between 10 and 20 per cent of total project spend, and the proportion rises with complexity: more trades, more documentation, more custom work. A full-house renovation or multi-storey terrace with joinery throughout sits at the upper end. Our Sydney interior design cost guide sets out current benchmarks by project type in detail.
Timelines vary with scope, but the design and documentation phases on a full renovation generally run several months before a project goes to tender, and construction follows from there. Heritage overlays and strata approvals both add time, and on a Sydney apartment renovation the strata process is often the longest single variable outside your control.
The most useful thing you can do at this stage is have a conversation. Get in touch and we will give you an honest read on the scope, the likely investment and whether we are the right studio for the project.