Inside a Fremantle working studio with a rooftop herb garden

Fremantle's High Street has always rewarded the curious. Tucked behind a restored nineteenth-century limestone shopfront, a working artist's studio opens onto a quiet laneway where the salt breeze from the harbour still finds its way through open windows. The door is usually propped open with a paint-spattered brick, and inside, canvases lean against brick walls in stacked conversations of colour.

The space belongs to ceramicist and painter Mira Holst, who has worked in the port city for over a decade. She shares the building with a small printmaker upstairs and a furniture maker in the rear workshop. Her studio is one of several in a row of adaptive reuse projects that have given Fremantle's West End a new cultural rhythm, balancing heritage protection with the working needs of contemporary makers.

The most surprising thing about the building sits five metres above the studio floor, where a rooftop herb garden has turned an otherwise unused service area into a productive, fragrant retreat. Holst grows what she needs for tea, garnish and small-batch glazes, and the rooftop has become as much a part of her practice as the wheel and the easel below.

A heritage shell in the West End

The building sits within Fremantle's Heritage Area, a designation administered by the City of Fremantle that places strict guidelines on external alterations. Original limestone walls, timber sash windows and the iron lacework on the veranda had to be retained, which shaped every interior decision Holst made. Internally, she was free to carve the space into functional zones without disturbing the street-facing fabric.

Local architect James Oaten, who oversaw the fitout, worked closely with the heritage officer to confirm that any new openings were reversible and that the new steel mezzanine could be removed without scarring the original ceilings. The result feels honest: the studio reads as a layered palimpsest, where the ghosts of the old general store sit comfortably alongside the clean lines of the new joinery.

This kind of careful negotiation between old and new mirrors a wider conversation happening across Perth's inner suburbs, where homeowners are weighing heritage character against the demands of contemporary family life. In some of those projects, the result is a quiet extension that simply makes the original home work better, as explored in a recent look at a cladded suburban extension in the western suburbs.

Inside the studio

The ground floor is divided into three loose zones. At the front, north-facing windows pour light onto a long timber table where Holst does her drawing and small-scale ceramic work. Behind it, a partially enclosed painting area catches the more controlled southern light, which she prefers for judging colour accurately on canvas.

The rear holds the messy work: a kick wheel wedged into the corner, a slab roller against the brick wall and shelving for greenware drying. A robust extraction system was added during the fitout to manage silica dust, complying with SafeWork WA requirements for studios that handle clay and glaze materials. Holst mixes her own glazes from local materials, including a dark iron-oxide wash derived from a Margaret River quarry.

Upstairs, a simple mezzanine level houses a reference library, a small kitchenette and a daybed where she sometimes sleeps when a firing runs late. The mezzanine is supported by black-steel columns that step neatly over the original ceiling joists. From this vantage, you can see how the building's high ceiling volumes were once used to store grain and general goods, long before anyone imagined a painter would hang work there.

The rooftop herb garden

The rooftop is reached by a narrow external stair tucked into the building's lightwell. The first thing that strikes you is the smell. Lemon myrtle, anise myrtle, native mint and common rosemary grow in galvanised troughs that follow the line of the parapet. A single olive tree shelters one corner, and several self-seeded nasturtiums have colonised the cracks between the pavers.

Holst designed the planting with a local permaculture consultant. The brief was simple: herbs she could use in the studio kitchen, plants that would tolerate the harsh summer sun and Westerly winds that whip up the Swan Coastal Plain, and species that would feed pollinators through the long, dry months. The list evolved to include thyme, oregano, flat-leaf parsley, society garlic, kangaroo paw for colour and a struggling but hopeful bay laurel.

Watering happens through a drip system connected to two slim rainwater tanks mounted on the western wall. With Perth's average rainfall of around 730 millimetres a year, the tanks are useful but rarely overflowing, so the system is tied into a mains backup that runs only when the soil moisture drops below a set threshold. Holst has kept a rough garden diary since the rooftop was planted, and the entries are revealing: a wet winter in 2024 nearly drowned the rosemary, while the heat dome of 2025 demanded morning watering by hand for several weeks.

The garden also supplies the small jarred herb blends she sells through the Fremantle Markets, and the lemon myrtle has become a quiet signature in her studio. Visitors often leave with a sprig in hand.

Plants currently thriving on the roof

Materials sourced close to home

Holst is deliberate about where her materials come from. The studio's new joinery is built from a single fallen jarrah tree milled at a small sawmill in the Perth Hills, and the benchtop in the wet area is a piece of offcut blackbutt sourced from a demolition yard in Osborne Park. The steel for the mezzanine came from a local fabricator in Bibra Lake.

The ceramic clays arrive from a producer near Ballarat in Victoria, and the kiln is an Australian-made test kiln she picked up secondhand from a ceramics teacher in Cottesloe. Where she can, she supports other small makers, exchanging studio space for product, knowledge or simply a long lunch. This quiet barter economy is one of the pleasures of working in Fremantle, where many of the small producers know one another personally.

The pendant lights over the long timber bench are locally made dining pendants, chosen for their warm, diffused glow, which suits the hours she spends drawing in the late afternoon. A simple dimmer lets her push the room into something more domestic at the end of a working day.

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Daily practice and local habits

A typical week in the studio follows a loose rhythm. Mondays and Tuesdays are for clay, when she can throw without interruption and let pieces firm up before midweek trimming. Wednesdays are painting days. Thursdays often involve a coffee at the nearby Moore and Moore cafe, where she meets other artists who work in the West End. Fridays are reserved for markets, deliveries and the occasional school visit.

Fremantle's slower pace, when compared with the long commute into the Perth CBD, has shaped her practice profoundly. She can walk to the harbour in ten minutes, source flowers from a neighbour's verge, and reach a hardware store in North Fremantle before most of her interstate colleagues have left the house. The studio is not glamorous, but it is embedded in the kind of everyday life that sustains slow, considered work.

She is also an active participant in the broader Western Australian design community, attending openings at the Fremantle Arts Centre and contributing work to the annual Sculpture by the Sea at Cottesloe. These gatherings, alongside events like Contemporary Wine In Design, keep her connected to the wider architecture and design conversation happening across the state.

Design details that quietly earn their place

Some of the best decisions in the studio are the smallest. The steel windows were restored rather than replaced, with new leadlight being commissioned only where the original was beyond repair. The kitchenette tap is a simple mixer from a plumbing supplier in Myaree. The garden troughs sit on hand-rolled steel feet, raising them off the rooftop membrane to prevent rust staining.

A covered veranda off the mezzanine, although modest, became the most contested element of the design. Holst and Oaten argued for keeping it open and unglazed, even through winter, on the grounds that a fully enclosed veranda would have triggered additional council approvals and would have blocked the rooftop breezes. The decision echoes broader thinking about how the contemporary veranda can be a generous threshold rather than a sealed buffer, an idea gaining traction in many of Perth's new homes.

The studio versus the rooftop

A quick comparison helps to set the two halves of Holst's working life side by side.

Element Inside the studio On the rooftop
Primary use Painting, ceramics, glazing Herb cultivation, tea breaks, drying
Light Controlled, mixed north and south Full sun, exposed to Westerlies
Key materials Jarrah, blackbutt, brick, steel Galvanised troughs, native herbs, pavers
Climate response Insulation, extraction, thermal mass Drip irrigation, mulch, wind-tolerant species
Visitors Clients, fellow artists, school groups Mostly Holst, the occasional bee

Both zones share a quiet commitment to local materials and a willingness to let the climate of Fremantle, sometimes gentle, often fierce, shape how the space is used.

Holst hosts an open studio the first Saturday of each month, with tea brewed from the rooftop and a small selection of recent work on view. The address is listed on her website, and the laneway entrance is the easiest way in. Visitors are advised to come prepared for the stairs, the breeze and the smell of lemon myrtle drifting down into the street. It is a small reminder that a working studio, like a good garden, rewards those who turn up in person.