Innehållsförteckning för Issue 119 December 2017 från Houses

CERAMICS Scottish-born Lindsey Wherrett remembers the day she finally found the courage to tell her husband what she really wanted to do with her life. “I had to hide my head under the bedcovers to get myself to say it out loud,” she recalls. For years she had stopped herself from saying the words “I want to study ceramics.” “I’d always had a hankering for ceramics but it didn’t feel like a proper career choice. Turning my back on [architecture] felt like a massive risk and a huge leap towards an uncertain future.” Lindsey’s declaration came while she was taking a break from architecture. She was enjoying the time off after the birth of her daughter and began studying ceramics in Hobart under her mentor Ben Richardson. Adventures in Europe…

BRISBANE, QLD “ The composition of the street elevation elements allows the architect to facilitate the family’s interaction with the surrounding neighbourhood.” For generations, Queenslanders built Queenslanders – timber boxes with pitched roofs and deep verandahs, raised on stumps to mitigate the hilly terrain. With confidence and conviction these houses were erected across the state. This conviction was born out of the designer’s belief that the Queenslander, constructed from locally sourced materials and incorporating passive environmental strategies, was right for Queensland. But how does a designer find such conviction? You might recognize the work of Brisbane-based architectural firm Vokes and Peters after its Auchenflower House (see Houses 117) recently won the 2017 Houses Awards’ Australian House of the Year. The Rainworth Hill House, situated in the adjoining suburb of Bardon,…

MELBOURNE, VIC “ There is a curious dynamic at play between the stillness created by the tall volume and a series of sculptural elements found within.” Only a stone’s throw from the Melbourne CBD, the streets of inner suburb Richmond are being transformed at a dizzying pace. It’s “blink and you’ll miss it” stuff, where century-old cottages disappear overnight to be replaced by cookie-cutter assemblages of render, glass balustrade and some new paper-thin cladding, or all of the above. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Some projects mine the history of their site in thoughtful ways, such as Jackson Clements Burrow’s Old House, retaining some history by printing a 1:1 scale photograph of the demolished cottage onto its glass box replacement. Other projects, such as Tanner House by…

01 Wooden Dolls These partly joyful, partly grim-looking Wooden Dolls aim to enhance any interior. The design is based on dolls designed and made by Alexander Girard for his own home, found in the Girard Estate, held by the Vitra Design Museum. spacefurniture.com.au 02 Blue Candleholders Designed by Thomas Dariel for Cappellini, Blue Candleholders are characterized by thin and rounded stems. Made of laminated metal with a base of durmast veneer, the indigo blue candlesticks both light and decorate the room. cultdesign.com.au 03 Lid Collection The Lid Collection by Tom Dixon is a set of simple boxes and lids, with multiple functions. Weighty and substantial, the collection’s components are crafted in high-quality solid blue glass, marble and stainless steel with a high-gloss copper finish. dedece.com 04 Gres high stool Expormim’s…

SYDNEY, NSW Bellevue Hill has long been regarded as one of Sydney’s most affluent suburbs, with the eastern enclave boasting some of the state’s most highly regarded heritage properties. They sit among other residences no less impressive in size or scale, raised and set back from narrow tree-lined streets that gently wind their way through the leafy neighbourhood. Key to Bellevue Hill’s charm is a rich tapestry of diverse architectural genres, which allows a sense of history to prevail. Certainly, this high-end eclecticism appealed to architect Eva-Marie Prineas’s clients, a professional couple with two teenage daughters, when they purchased the home. The circa 1920s two-storey brick abode with slate shingles oozes character and was in excellent condition, thanks to a previous renovation by Burley Katon Halliday. While the clients were…

NOOSA, QLD The Mitti Street House by James Russell Architect sits below a narrow roadway at the end of a simple gravel drive. Huddled against the sun-dappled rainforest of Noosa National Park and within walking distance but not in sight of the little beaches characteristic of Noosa, this house has a low setting and close neighbours, meaning there is no compelling prospect upon which to gaze. Instead, the spirit of the place derives from the nearness of the ocean sensed from within the beauty of the grove: a quality of calming seclusion under a rising canopy of green. In response to site conditions and in an act of ingenious architectural introversion, the architects have conceived the house as a simultaneously contained yet open world that addresses the sky and the…

MELBOURNE, VIC Rachel Nolan of Kennedy Nolan starts her story of this alteration and addition with the description of a meeting. Not with her clients, but with the elderly couple from whom they’d just bought the house. “We were charmed by them,” says Rachel, “and we were struck by the strong sense of their personalities, which they had so clearly imprinted on the house. It felt warm with memory.” The couple had lived in the old Victorian home on a leafy street in Melbourne’s Kew for decades, first with a growing family and then by themselves. The house had been a stage set for these many years of life, but in turn, their years of life had been marked on the house, through incremental renovations and the accumulation of furniture…

D ’ ENTRECASTEAUX CHANNEL, TAS “ The simplicity of the form provides a calm backdrop for life and creates a strong connection to the broader landscape.” Contemplating migrating to Tasmania from Sydney, Andrew and Hilary Carpenter were looking for a place in the country that could become a refuge for their retirement. While scoping sites they were also researching ideas for building systems and materials for their new home. In doing so, they met Ryan Strating from Hobart-based architecture practice Core Collective Architects at a building expo in Sydney. They began discussing the pros and cons of different places to live in Tasmania, and Ryan agreed to assist them to look for a site. He found the perfect spot fifty minutes’ drive south of Hobart, on a site that overlooks…

EMERGING PRACTICE Established in 2016, Sydney architecture studio Trias is barely two years old and already it has earned global attention. In 2017 it became the only Australian practice to be named one of twenty “hotly tipped talents and promising practices from around the world” in Wallpaper magazine’s Architects’ Directory. Trias is a collective of three highly accomplished individuals – Jennifer McMaster, Jonathon Donnelly and Casey Bryant – each with a swag of awards, scholarships and prizes. Together, this powerhouse of a studio has collected a proverbial cabinet full of competition trophies in its short life. “The first project that allowed us to start working and get the ball rolling for the three of us was … a competition we did, when Jen and I were still students, for a…

MELBOURNE, VIC The clients of Zen Architects’ Light Saw House bought the original turn-of-the-century weatherboard cottage in Melbourne’s Fitzroy North in the late 1990s. “It was beautiful, the garden was lovely and we could almost afford it,” says owner Craig Stephens. It was intended to be a home where the couple could raise a family, but life took a different direction. They spent more than two decades away as expatriates living in London and Sydney and their cottage fell into a state of disrepair, with cracks in its walls, a “crazily overgrown garden” and squatters commandeering the property. Situated on the west side of Merri Creek, where the ground is “notoriously horrendous for building footings,” according to architect Luke Rhodes, the house needed to be re-stumped. As the clients were…

PERTH, WA After she had lived in her renovated house for several months, homeowner and client Gillian sat down to write a list for her architect. She was somewhat surprised at how easy she found it to compile more than thirty-five bullet points to describe the joy she and her husband, Richard, experience in their new home. But no-one was more surprised than their architect, Philip Stejskal of Philip Stejskal Architecture. “It was quite unusual to receive such a list,” Philip says. “It’s the first time that we’ve had client feedback documented so formally.” The couple had bought the house – a picture-book corner cottage in South Fremantle, Western Australia – for Richard’s mother in 1990, when she moved to Australia. She lived there for twenty-six years before she passed…

SYDNEY, NSW After nearly a century of growing pains, it could be said that apartment design in Sydney is finally reaching a stage of maturity. The first decades of the twentieth century saw the promising start of apartment design in the CBD and the eastern suburbs. Edgecliff, Potts Point, Elizabeth Bay and Darlinghurst have fine examples of well-designed and generously-appointed buildings. Notable examples are Kingsclere (Maurice Halligan and Frederick Wilton, 1912), Carinthia (Walter Leslie Nielsen, 1926) and Birtley Towers (Emil Sodersten, 1934). While there were some notable mid- century examples, such as 17 Wylde Street (Aaron Bolot, 1951), the apartment buildings of later decades – think of the brick boxes of the sixties, seventies and eighties – have left a legacy of mean- spirited, unattractive and poorly designed homes. However,…

BELLARINE PENINSULA, VIC Barwon Heads, on the Bellarine Peninsula south of Melbourne, is as charming a coastal town as you could expect to find this close to a major city. It’s laidback and beautiful, with a main street of cafes, fish ’n’ chips and shops that sell indeterminate combinations of vaguely “seasidey” gifts and homewares. A couple of blocks back from here, on the sandy banks of the Barwon River, holidaymakers hire paddleboards and weigh up the pros and cons of dancing across hot asphalt to buy an ice-block because they can’t be bothered putting their shoes on. It’s that kind of place. Fantastic. The town is expanding, but in its suburban heart many of the new beach houses are being designed to hold on to the spirit of the…

Helen Norrie: Is this the first house you have built, or the first time you have used an architect? Hilary and Andrew Carpenter: We had three previous houses – two project homes that we built and an older house that we renovated, but we hadn’t used an architect before. HN: What made you decide to involve an architect in this project? HC + AC: In the early stages we were looking for something already built. However, we looked for two years and didn’t find anything. We decided that buying a block of land and building was an option, as we were a bit disappointed in the housing stock that we had seen. In the meantime, we started talking to Ryan Strating of Core Collective Architects; we met him at the…

MELBOURNE, VIC City apartments and coastal houses satisfy different needs in different locations, and it can be a pleasure to move freely between the two, and an equal pleasure for the architect engaged to design for the different settings. As the third architectural project undertaken on their client’s behalf by John Wardle Architects, Freshwater Apartment at Melbourne’s Southbank complements a beach house on the Great Ocean Road and an office fitout in a historical bluestone building in the Melbourne CBD. The design strategies in each location naturally differ, despite having occupants in common. The beach house, located in Fairhaven, is a geometrically complex dwelling of generous proportions, lined in glowing timber, which positions the client family close to the surf and surfing that is a shared passion. This connection to…

BRISBANE, QLD Enthusiasts of Brisbane architecture usually associate the work of Peter Heathwood with his seminal lightweight houses, whose elegant box-like forms were often wrapped in a sunshading veil. His standing was established by projects such as the competition-winning Plywood Exhibition House, which launched his practice with John Dalton in 1956, and the Speare House of 1959, whose demolition in the late nineties raised protests. Heathwood’s body of work also includes a collection of masonry houses, which are less well known. With a language of brickwork and circular geometries, the sensibilities of the architect’s approach were successfully realized in the Fulcher Residence of 1964. Heathwood trained locally from 1951 to 1956 and the post-WWII cultural setting influenced his outlook on architecture. He was part of a cohort of eager young…