Good soil + strawberries and herbs + pig face + myoporum purpureum + succulent/cacti + paint a beautiful colour (with excellent surface preparation). All and any of those will take interesting but ordinary, which you currently have, to gorgeous and eyecatching. Go for it! May the force be with you! ;-)

I realized i forgot to update what i did with the wall.. Now I know so many people said not to go ahead with it, but i am pig headed and did it anyway. It took me 5 days (about 15 hours to fill in the mortar and then 2 hours to put on 2 coats of paint. I am really happy with how it turned out. I understand it is not quite 'industrial' but i was probably lacking the correct terminology for what i was after (in truth i wasn't sure what i was after, it was more about not wanting the wall to stay in it's current state!)

my suggestion would be to keep the new kitchen in proportion to the size and scale of the whole house so i prefer option 2 with cabinets only as high as the top of the window, tall narrow fridge (less than 80cm wide) next to the back door with wall mounted mw and wall cabinets all round, no tall cabinets, more counter on the fridge wall then stove, sink and dw along the window wall to make sure that there is counter on either side of the stove and sink and locations for a toaster, kettle and other appliances..but exact location of appliances depends on budget and sizes of all the cabinets you want to use.. but, if you plan to remove gas in future, why not start with electric appliances and best insulation ready to add solar power at a future date? ...eg check out the electric air sourced hot water heaters and consider an electric flame heater for the kitchen fireplace and save the gas heater for the hew rear living area although it may be possible to have one heater with hot air connected to the other rooms with an in roof ducting system and, if you have long term plans to alter the rear lean-to research options for renovating the whole house and then plan all the work in stages...eg i would have the new laundry/bathroom next to the refurbished bedroom (master suite?) and have the future new rear living area with the north aspect

You're welcome Amany. You could also search the Houzz website for "stone walls" for example, there are 1000's of examples of things you might be interested in. All you need to decide on if you seriously want such a wall or something like it whether you build the idea into a house plan so you would have a concrete foundation included to carry the wall, or if you are too far past the idea, in other words your home is built and you would like to replicate the idea in some way, then the tiles could still give you a similar look but it would have joins and when I say tiles it might still be real stone cut thinly so as to mimic a real full thickness stone wall. So below are two photo's from the thousands of photo's under the title "internal stone walls" on Houzz. I'm sure both are real, the first one looks like limestone and the second sandstone. The first one is a tile or as described in the picture a "veneer" and has been attached to a simple brick wall I imagine but the effect is still very nice, this randome sized pattern is called an "ashla pattern" I think just looking at the edges on the second photo it looks like genuine full thickness reall stone but both are still real. You can get more info by clicking on either photo. Good luck. Cheers, Barbara