Dinner in the Kitchen of the Year
Susan and Tan Chau have opened up their historic Burnside abode to showcase a very special property, and the friends who help to make it a home.
Susan and Tan Chau are preparing for guests to arrive for an evening dinner that’s sure to roll into a night of fun. The welcoming couple is smiling and chatting away, zipping around their spectacular new kitchen – one of Australia’s best kitchens, in fact.
The kitchen, designed by architecture firm Atelier Bond and brought to life by builders Craig Linke Bespoke Building, was named Australia’s best kitchen in the Kitchen of the Year at the 2023 HIA-CSR Australian Housing Awards. Then, beating other kitchens from around the world, it went on to be named International Kitchen of the Year at the 2023 Trends International Design Awards.
When awarding the kitchen the prestigious accolade, TIDA Awards judges described the kitchen as having a personality like no other.
“The more you look at it, the better it gets,” they said. “It features unexpected finishes combinations, proportions and playful but sophisticated forms. The details are clever and the space is hugely functional.”
The international award-winning kitchen features elements of brass and Verdi Alpi green marble. Photograph Christopher Morrison.
This Adelaide kitchen impressed judges to such an extent that it beat out a renovated historic kitchen in London. The space underwent an amazing transformation in 2022 after an extensive plan to convert what had been two side-by-side kitchens into one grand space. Susan and Tan’s home is a restored 1890s former pub – the old Burnside Hotel – and the former home of Lionel Logue, an elocution teacher depicted by Geoffrey Rush in award-winning film, The King’s Speech. Logue’s father, George, had been the publican at the hotel, and much later, the building had been informally divided into two parts, with different generations of the one family living on different sides. Which is how it was when Susan, Tan and their three children, Madison, Benjamin and Annelise – now teenagers – were looking to make the move from New South Wales to Adelaide in 2018.
This was the first home Susan looked at, and she put in an offer that same day.
Freshly-caught Murray cod with plenty of herbs
“I like that it’s old and has so much character, but everything’s been taken care of,” Susan says. “You can tell a lot of love has gone into it.”
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And then, when Susan and Tan moved in, yet more love was poured into it. Today, they have the ideal kitchen in which to create beautiful meals and memories, surrounded by a striking statement in the Verdi Alpi green marble. The luxurious marble is set off by aged brass that has been hand-wrapped around the rangehood hanging from the middle of the ceiling.
Even the flooring was a labour of love; the Palladiana floor combines Italian Calcatta, Statuario and Elba marble pieces, with gold chips added, which were then ground, honed, polished and sealed in a three-week process to cover the 30-square-metre floor.
Susan tears fresh herbs into the salad in the moments before her guests arrive.
A circular wine station sits beneath a free-hanging shelf for the glasses and is made from that same bold marble and brass hanging rod.
“It’s different, but not too in-your-face,” Susan says. “We didn’t want something modern for this house.”
Tan says the idea was to create a kitchen with colour – grey and white was out. The aesthetic spills out to the living space, where the servery is clad in the green marble and simultaneously offers both connection and delineation between the areas.
The kitchen is every bit the entertainer’s space – the pair having garnered a love for hosting while living in Forbes in New South Wales, where Tan was a dentist and Susan a lawyer.
“We were always going to someone’s house or having people over,” Susan says. The couple met in Darwin; Tan was working there following stints in Murray Bridge, Mount Barker and Launceston. Susan is originally from Sydney and was in Darwin on a holiday when she serendipitously met Tan. After dating long distance, the couple moved to Cowra and then Forbes, where Tan opened his first business.
Susan tears fresh herbs into the salad in the moments before her guests arrive.
The couple now run their own business here in Adelaide – Portable Dental Health – taking on the mobile dentistry model, partly to spend more time with the kids.
Tonight, as they stand together in their entertainer’s kitchen preparing the upcoming dishes, their children are nearby too, scattered about the house and garden with their friends.
Marina Filippova, Elke Weeks, Dani Ha, Judi Cannon and Susan Chau sit and sip ahead of dinner.
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Some of tonight’s guests sit in the living space next to the kitchen, sipping Champagne, chatting away to Susan while she mixes and chops. Judi Cannon and her husband, Jonathan, have been friends with Susan and Tan for more than 20 years, and both sets of children are the same ages.
Judi and Jonathan embarked on the 10-and-a-half-hour drive from Forbes to be here tonight.
Russian-born Marina Filippova sits and chats while her partner, Sava Timofeev creates a mouth-watering scent outside, with his Georgian lamb and chicken shaslik, cooking above hot coals.
Sava, who was born in Poland and lived for many years in Kazakhstan, is president of the Sambo Federation Australia and Marina also works within the federation. Susan and Tan met the couple through martial arts, after Susan signed her children up when they first moved over from Forbes.
Susan herself trained to begin with. “I was a pit bull,” she laughs.
The stunning kitchen is soon filled with Susan and Tan’s friends, and their children. Roger and Takako Sallis, lawyers and owners of RSA Law, have just returned from a holiday in the Whitsundays with Susan and Tan.
There’s also Elke Weeks, owner of Red Rosie Scent Design Studio and Ryan Wijayasekara, state manager for Temperzone Australia. They’ve also invited Tan’s high school friend Cuong Tran and partner Dani Ha. Tan and Cuong reconnected after realising their children attend the same language class. The atmosphere very quickly turns from a quiet drink into a lively gathering with stories and the sound of laughter bouncing around the space.
The kids crowd around for pre-dinner snacks.
The guests reach for an array of snacks on the kitchen island, starting with Susan’s charcuterie board and a platter of homemade sushi and dipping sauce. Perhaps the only moment of quiet is when Sava’s meats hit the island, which guests wrap in thin, bubbled bread, smothering it all in spicy Georgian sauces.
In the formal dining space, tonight’s table is set among the beautiful heritage surroundings, which the couple has masterfully revived with splashes of colour that are bright, yet perfectly restrained, which is a decorating theme throughout, and Susan says it’s a matter or trial and error.
“You’ve got a core direction of what you want to achieve and it either works or doesn’t,” Susan says.
Atop the antique dining table, Susan has set detailed Noritake plates, paired with colourful placemats, while overlooking the table is a painting by a Forbes artist, which the couple had commissioned in 2016 to reflect themes from the town.
Susan serves the Khalua tiramisu and home-made frangelico ice cream.
The rich peanut butter stout cake.
For dinner, Susan and Tan have a freshly-caught Murray cod with Mediterranean herbs and pistachio, and to go alongside, there’s a Vietnamese prawn salad and a fennel, apple and orange salad with pecan. To finish, dessert is Kahlua tiramisu and homemade Frangelico ice cream, and a peanut butter stout cake.
This article first appeared in the March 2025 issue of SALIFE magazine.
