Furnishing a new Melbourne home — a fresh build in the Clyde North–Cranbourne growth corridor, a townhouse in the middle suburbs, a period place closer in — tends to go wrong in the same five ways. None of them are about taste. They’re about sequence and scale, and they’re expensive because they involve the biggest,

Walk into most Melbourne dining rooms — the front room of a Brunswick terrace, the open-plan corner of a new Clyde North estate — and you’ll find the same gap. There’s a table, there are chairs, and then there’s a pile of placemats, serving bowls and good glassware migrating between the kitchen bench and the