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"When we moved in, it was just disgusting." She is talking about her home, a California bungalow in Bellevue Hill that certainly isn't disgusting any more.
"Every room was a different colour - bright pink, bright yellow, green. It looked like something out of a paint catalogue."
It also had patterned carpets, an ugly, leaky rear extension and "a horrible little kitchen".
Even so, when Bartos and husband Jonny Samengo-Turner inspected the property in 1998, they instantly knew this was the one for them.
But behind the colour riot, she saw the house had "good bones".
"Structurally, it was clear that the front, traditional part of the house worked really well," she explains. "And there was this big area at the back which just needed a couple of walls knocked out."
The couple planned to renovate in stages.
The highest priority, says Bartos, was to get white paint on the walls. "Living in a house which was this colour explosion, with patterns everywhere, was too much for us to bear."
They also rewired, put in contemporary lighting, ripped up the carpet and had the pine floorboards polished.
The next plan included knocking down the rear extension, which featured a brass, freestanding fireplace, pine panelling, slate floor and exposed brickwork.
"Swedish sauna meets Thredbo ski lodge," Bartos describes it. "All the ticks in all the '70s boxes."
Not everyone thought this a bad thing. "After we'd done the first set of renovations, some people thought we'd done the back in a '70s style," says Samengo-Turner. "They're going, 'wow, that's really retro'; and we're going, 'no, we haven't done anything to that yet.' "
Before they could embark on this stage, however, Bartos fell pregnant.
Before they were born, the expectant couple decided to put off the major work and concentrate on a smaller job.
The next priority was the kitchen.
"Cooking is my biggest hobby," says Samengo-Turner. "To cook properly, you need a proper kitchen that works really well." The new kitchen, with a deep, stainless-steel benchtop, Miele stove, Smeg oven and copious storage space, fits the bill.
Eventually, in the final renovations, the old kitchen became the pantry or, as Bartos calls it, the engine room. All the appliances are stashed there to save space and maintain the new kitchen's "clean lines".
To be "100 per cent sure that everything we'd planned was the right thing to do" the new parents thought it would be better to live in the house with the kids before going ahead with the last stage.
As a result, the main change of plan concerned the playroom. "It wasn't until we had children we understood what the concept of a playroom needed to be," says Bartos. The original design was self-contained. Now the playroom connects to the main living area with a large sliding door - an enormous blackboard covers the playroom side, the other side is timber veneer.
With the door open, the children can see out into the garden and the parents can see the children. "Not so much from a safety point of view," says Bartos, "but because I like to see them."
With the door closed the children can play and watch TV when guests are over. "We wanted a house that was good for entertaining and that the kids would feel comfortable in too," says Bartos. "We love having people over here."
"A lot of people said we wouldn't be able to do it, have a house that was simple, minimalist and elegant, and at the same time practical," Samengo-Turner continues. "And I think we have. It's incredibly easy to keep clean."
The final renovation stage was completed last October. The ski lodge is gone; in its place is an airy, open-plan room with a polished white concrete floor and a simple open gas fireplace.
The outside wall is a set of full-length, bi-fold glass doors. When they're closed, it's a cosy space, perfect for settling on the couch to watch TV on the flat plasma screen mounted on the wall.
When Samengo-Turner opens the doors, the effect is dramatic. Suddenly the garden becomes part of the room, thanks partly to the concrete floor that extends outside. "For eight months of the year, these are open all the time, day and night," he says. From the garden, the sight-line stretches through to the front of the house, creating an almost theatrical sense of space.
Bartos, who has worked for a large, commercial architectural firm for 13 years, loved working on her own home.
A perfectionist, she obsessed over the detail. "It's been designed a bit like a boat. We wanted to make sure we didn't waste an inch of space."
Fortunately the couple had very similar ideas. Her husband, jokes Bartos, was "a great client". She had to talk him around on only a couple of things, including the concrete floor.
The only thing they would do differently is to make the window in the playroom bigger, though the kids don't seem to mind - they can still use it to communicate with the 18-year-old twins who live next door.
The parents are happy too. "It's just perfect for the way we live," says Samengo-Turner.
Perhaps almost too perfect. "We never seem to get asked anywhere; everybody seems to always come here."
The sure sign of a successful renovation.
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