Innehållsförteckning för Issue 133 April 2020 från Houses

The tenth year of the Houses Awards provides a golden opportunity to look in the rear-view mirror at a decade of Australian residential design. Through the specific lens of Australian House of the Year award winners, we are able to consider how architecture’s response to people and place has progressed in the last 10 years. Across the group of award winners, a number of themes emerge that, over time, represent the evolution of shared design aspirations. The first common thread that connects the winning houses is evident in the House in Country NSW by Virginia Kerridge Architect (2011 Australian House of the Year). The design is informed by the use of material in the existing stone house to propose a new architectural language in timber. The harmonization of the new…

When it comes to building or renovating a bathroom or laundry, luxurious finishes and a creative use of colour don’t have to be limited to tiles and tap fittings. Stormtech’s range of coloured grates, in marine grade stainless steel, serve as a designer feature for wet areas, including bathrooms where linear drainage is often used in open shower concepts. Stormtech has released new metallic colours to provide homeowners with more decorative solutions for rooms that might be predominantly white or neutral. Inspired by emerging global colour trends, and a growing interest in metallic finishes, the warm, lustrous colours of ‘Satin Black,’ ‘Bronze,’ ‘Brass’ and ‘Copper’ can add a unique architectural finish to any bathroom design, beautifully complementing tapware, lighting and other accessories. As durable and seamless drainage options, with an…

The Mornington Peninsula narrows as you head toward Sorrento, with the relative calm of Port Phillip Bay to the north and the wilds of Bass Strait to the south. Residents of this area tend to define themselves by living on either side of this thin strip of land – turn right for yachting, left for surf. Coastal House by O’Connor and Houle is tucked behind the primary dune on the southern edge, surrounded by a dense landscape of wind-sculpted moonah, ti-tree and coastal beard-heath. The clients found O’Connor and Houle, a Melbourne-based practice established in 1996 by Annick Houle and Stephen O’Connor, by wandering through the couple’s own Pirates Bay holiday home when it was up for sale. Having rented a house nearby for years, the clients had purchased a…

In 1997, my wife Rhoda and I moved back to Perth after spending five years living in Broome and working in the Kimberley. For some time, we rented an apartment in Sunny Meed, the iconic block on Mount Street designed by mid-century architects Krantz and Sheldon. But before long, prompted by a significant rise in rent, we started to look for a house to purchase and renovate. We found a 250-square-metre north-facing battleaxe block on Vincent Street in Leederville, a short walk from our favourite haunts of Oxford Street and the Luna Cinemas. Inspired by the flexibility of French architect Le Corbusier’s 1914 Dom-Ino House and the iconic 1949 home of American architects Ray and Charles Eames, with great bravado, I decided I could build a $100,000 home on this…

This thoughtful reworking by ME of a 1970s split-level house in the Gold Coast suburb of Miami opens up an internalized floor plan to create a connected and contemporary home for a young family of four. Located in a quiet cul-de-sac, Cantala Cottage is within walking distance of the beach and other local amenities. The cul-de-sac has a relaxed and friendly feeling with deep front yards and low or no boundary walls. Architect Matthew Eagle has peeled back years of incremental additions – a patchwork of external and internal cladding types and a “tacked on” bay window and sunroom – in order to, in Matthew’s own words, “extract a specialness” from the old cottage. Matthew has preserved and reused a significant amount of the original fabric while also making targeted…

01 Expando T furniture fitting Blum’s Expando T fitting is a thin-front solution for cupboard doors and drawers, allowing for a plethora of finishes to be used in bathroom furniture, from laminate to concrete, stone to ceramics. Expando T is suitable for fronts as thin as eight millimetres. blum.com 02 Blade drain Sleek, shallow and stylish, the Blade drain from Aquabocci can be installed in myriad bathroom designs, thanks to its specially designed fittings and attachments. The channel is available in four colours, can be cut to any length and can be adjusted to suit any tile or stone thickness. aquabocci.com.au 03 Axia tapware The new ultra-thin Axia collection from Phoenix Tapware is a beautifully crafted and modern twist on tradition. The full range of tapware products includes an innovative…

The Sydney harbourside suburb of Birchgrove is one of those places that has a kind of forced perspective about it. As you travel deeper into the peninsula, the streets get narrower and the houses feel like they start to lean towards you. Taken and occupied in the late 1700s, the area’s first few residences were moderated with civilized distances between them. However, the subsequent occupation, division and subdivision of land into smaller and smaller parcels, as industry established itself on valuable harbour land, saw space – particularly outdoor space – become a premium. Now, the industry is long gone and a lot of the harbourside land has been renewed as public parkland. The housing stock continues to evolve as houses that had once turned their backs on the industrial infrastructure…

As you weave through the flat residential grid of streets in Bowral, a town in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, a pattern emerges. Front gardens are populated with hedges, picket fences, decorative gates, garage doors and, generally, a flowering European tree centred in a very green lawn. These gardens seem to be a polite layer of defence that offers no clues about the private spaces that lie beyond the curtains of the house facades. Cloud Cottage by Takt Studio is therefore a little disarming on first approach. In place of a front fence, there is instead an array of native plants among several raised white-brick planters. The garden is strewn with damp hay and one or both of the owners can often be found tending to it. The…

01 Silica ceramic basket Performing as both a decorative and a practical piece, the Silica ceramic basket from Barcelona brand Octaevo is made of delicately woven earthenware, typifying the southern European aesthetic of organic forms and geometric lines. It is available in four contemporary hues. octaevo.com 02 Lola rug Pop Art style and geometry marry in Rug Society’s Lola, a hand-tufted rug full of personality. Made with New Zealand wool and linen, Lola rug’s straight lines play off its round shape and its bright colours serve to beautifully complement timber interiors. rugsociety.eu 03 Assemble sofa Designed by Destroyers/Builders, the Assemble sofa encourages exactly what its name suggests: assembling your own sofa. Inspired by weathered pebbles, the sofa’s asymmetrical cushions can be arranged in various forms, from two-seaters to poufs. valerie-objects.com…

Park Life is located on a corner in the Champion Road Estate Precinct, a largely intact pocket of 1940s Housing Commission duplexes beside the vast Newport railyards in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Williamstown. A cluster of compact houses set well back from curving streets with deep nature strips, the estate was designed using the Garden City principles popular in Australia at the time. The movement – an attempt to marry housing and countryside by combining the best of both worlds – was a response to often grim conditions in inner-city tenements and terraces. Architecture Architecture has recognized the opportunities and constraints of living on a prominent corner in this “park life” setting.There is a focus on the house’s interface with the public realm – vital when your backyard is…

Marking the threshold between old and new in this lyrical family home, on the crest of Melbourne’s Ruckers Hill, is a vivid story of place etched in stained glass. At the base of the scene, depicted in section, murrnong sprout from the earth, their sinewy stems topped with bright yellow flowers. Arching above them are glazed lemon tree branches, hanging heavy with fruit and abuzz with fat native bees. These emblems foreground an image of the city skyline as it exists today, serving as a signature of time. This stained glass window by artist Nadine Keegan, newly commissioned by the owners of Ruckers Hill House, marks the point of transition from the existing red brick Edwardian house to the sculptural rear addition. Its inclusion and placement reflects how Studio Bright…

Sarah Henry embarked on the design of her own home after almost 10 years of running architecture practice Studiofour with co-director Annabelle Berryman. Sarah’s home, Beaumaris Residence, belongs neatly within Studiofour’s body of work. Yet at the same time, the project was approached as a testing ground for new ideas and bubbling design urges; an opportunity for the practice to push ideas to extremes. The house is located in the Melbourne suburb of Beaumaris. Sited on a sloping block, it is surrounded by bulky and uninspiring project homes and in close proximity to a busy road. In order to shut out the noise, the house is inward-looking, its spaces organized around a central atrium. The house gently steps down the site to follow the topography, but the entry and front…

Can we ever really establish where ideas come from? The unlikeliness of this humble house, built in 1975 by architect Darryl Way for his family in the Perth western suburb of Claremont, remains intriguing, even after intimate conversations with the late architect’s family members and colleagues, countless visits to the site and close inspections of originals drawings, notes, files and photographs. Born in Hong Kong in 1937 and with a transient childhood that took him through the Himalayas to Singapore, Darryl came to Western Australia as a young boarding student at Guildford Grammar School before embarking on his architectural studies at the Perth Technical School. Like many of his fellow graduates, Darryl drifted away from traditional architecture and moved to London, where he was strongly influenced by the ideas of…