When Melbourne-based interior designer Nickolas Gurtler was tasked with creating a real estate office that didn’t look like a traditional workspace, inspiration came from some down-to-earth sources.

Situated in the leafy, community-oriented Sydney suburb of Redfern, the Ray White Touma Taylor team was seeking a new workspace to reflect its founders’ grassroots connection to the area. Local real estate legends Charles Touma and Peter Taylor have deep ties to local residents and businesses, and it was this warmth and familiarity which interior designer Nickolas Gurtler used as his principal creative source. 

“The project was an exciting opportunity,” says Nickolas Gurtler, who was first engaged by Ray White Touma Taylor in late September 2023. “The location was fantastic and the building was great, but the clients really just wanted to up their game.” 

Light woods and cool silver shades reflect direct sunlight from the tall windows at the Reception area of the new Touma Taylor office

The Ray White Group had several smaller, independent teams redefining the real estate workspace with bespoke, high-end offices – a level of design ambition that Touma Taylor was eager to match.

A space worthy of a local legend

The core inspiration for Gurtler’s initial design proposal was the level of esteem held for team lead Charles Touma. “When we did site visits, particularly in the beginning, it really struck me how much Charles knew everyone in the community,” Gurtler recalls. “Like, old people walking their dogs and young kids, he just knew everybody!”

The new Touma Taylor office provides the sophistication of a high-end hotel with the home comforts of a well-appointed living room

It was this pervading sense of warmth surrounding Touma that informed many of the brown, earthy tones present in the final design. Notably evident within the office’s inviting, copper-toned boardroom – where sleek rattan and walnut chairs replace traditional desk seating – the shared workspaces and private meeting rooms radiate cohesion and a strong sense of cooperative spirit.

With the project build commencing in May 2024, Gurtler underlines his desire to ensure the sleek, glossy surfaces remained Sydney-appropriate, while also feeling “a little bit more inviting, particularly in the more public areas”. 

Cool brown shades reflect the surrounding tree-lined neighbourhood of the new office’s Redfern location, while also radiating the warmth generated by team lead Charles Touma

“We also wanted to make it sleek and sexy,” Gurtler clarifies. “I mean, Charles is very suave, and all of their real estate team are super well-dressed and amazingly put together, so I wanted to make sure that the space kind of reflected that.”

Where home comforts meet hotel chic

The challenge, then, was to balance the warmth of home with the elegance of a high-end hotel, a space that could be adaptable to everything from internal functions to external auctions. 

Lost Profile Studio light fittings in the sleek boardroom offer a warm source of illumination, complementing the bronze and sand hues of the surrounding office

This classy, startlingly contemporary aesthetic is well-served by the office’s new kitchen area, flush with black handmade Zellige tiles and deep-hued marble surfaces. As such, the brief Gurtler was given boiled down to the need for a space which reflected the welcoming, community-centric standing of the Touma Taylor team, while also serving as an arena to conduct business and beguile prospective clients. 

“It was mostly based around the practicalities and how many boardrooms that they needed,” Gurtler says of the initial brief.  “But also having space for community and a flexibility around the workflow, and how everything would work.”

Solid black hues from the handmade Zellige tiles in the newly refurbished kitchen add a pronounced touch of class to the busy real estate office

With the Touma Taylor team moving into the completed office in October 2024, the five-month build involved what Gurtler regards as “a real strip-down”. The building’s previous function had served as a display suite for residential apartments on the other side of the street, presenting scaled-down versions of kitchens and bathrooms. Gurtler and his team had initially planned to retain some of the original materials on account of their high level of finish and attractive design. 

“But we quite soon realised that was not going to pan out,” he confesses, “so we stripped it all the way back down to the concrete and rebuilt it up from there. We changed the floor plan somewhat significantly as well, as it was just all smaller rooms and a bit of a maze.”

Located in the leafy Sydney suburb of Redfern, the new office replicates the calm, open spaces of the surrounding neighbourhood

It was here that Gurtler took inspiration from the free-flow nature of team lead Charles Touma, observing how expansively he was immersed in the local area. This sense of outward reach, of moving freely within the breezy, tree-lined suburb of Redfern, is what led Gurtler to orient the interior around the team itself. 

An office that will make you love coming to work

“We set out to create a workflow for the different offices and desks in these areas that we thought would be conducive to how real estate agents work,” Gurtler says. “I mean, they’re always on the phone, they aren’t sitting at a desk typing, so we didn’t want to approach this workspace in the same way that we would if it were an accounting firm or a law firm.”

Open-plan workspaces accommodate the lively energy of the Touma Taylor team

Feedback – much like the soft, modern light fittings by Melbourne-based manufacturer Lost Profile Studio – has been glowing. Having come from the more generic, straight-laced settings of conventional real estate offices, Gurtler reports the Touma Taylor team have enjoyed newfound eagerness to come into the office. 

“They love being in there every day,” he says. “That’s very rewarding for me as a designer, to know that you did something they were thrilled with and had worked really well for them. We really did want to do something different and give them tools that they could use to help with their real estate practice, so it has been a very rewarding project for us.”

Photography by Timothy Kaye.

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