Innehållsförteckning för Issue 155 December 2023 från Houses

Occupying a corner site in a quiet Burleigh Waters (Gold Coast) street, The Cottage recalibrates its owners’ relationship with both their own home and their neighbourhood. Together, Justin Humphrey Architects and their clients, Duncan and Lizzie, have worked with the fabric of an existing late-1970s home to bring out the spaces most vital to day-to-day life – and to strengthen the relationships between spaces across the property. This recalibration sees the family home entirely transformed through a series of disarmingly simple elaborations, reclassifications and extensions that respond to observation and opportunity. With new kitchen, dining and living areas, the fabric that wraps around this corner block now serves to both enclose a private yard and establish a generous relationship with the street. A large backyard pool was also downsized, reclaiming…

Tucked away off a quiet laneway, in a leafy green part of White Gum Valley, a short distance from the vibrant port city of Fremantle, is the new home of architect Matt Delroy-Carr, his wife and their two young boys. There is often a fascination with the homes architects design for themselves and their families, with a proliferation of publications dedicated to this topic. What is most interesting about an architect’s own home is that it can have something that has been termed “activist potential”: an opportunity to challenge the status quo. There is a housing crisis in Australia on two fronts – affordability and sustainability – that continues to grow. MDC Architects has recognized the activist potential of Farrier Lane House, using the design as a place to test…

The Northern Rivers region during the 1970s was a time and place of radical optimism, spurred by the desire for an alternative to mainstream consumer-centric lifestyles. This collective urge to mend the ails of modern society captivated architect Christine Vadasz, who established her practice there in 1974. Hungarian-born Vadasz had grown up in Adelaide and been shoehorned into a conservative education and early career experience as a student in the office of I. M. Pei in New York, but had learnt about a freer, more creative architectural practice while working with progressively minded Bill Lucas in Sydney in the early 1970s. Vadasz moved to the tightly held enclave of Wategos Beach, a short drive from the centre of Byron Bay, and the home she designed there for her family –…

It’s rare that a single-fronted terrace renovation is so well-recognized by the locals. Yet many in the area know “the house beside the bottle shop” and have watched as a once-derelict house was transformed into a crisp and punchy piece of design. Located in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote, the terrace is uncommonly visible: locals can see it from the street, the bottle shop next door and the busier intersecting street. Between its cobalt blue awning, the alluring glow of the internal pendant light and Lucas Grogan’s mural on the wall in the front yard, its features catch the eye. Karen Alcock, principal of MA and Co and owner of the house, speaks of using simplicity and repetition to achieve quality – a lesson she’s learnt through decades of working…

In November 1995, I was working on my fifth-year major design project in what was then a six-year degree in architecture at the University of Sydney, and living in a cockroach-infested share house in Redfern. I remember the day that my sister Georgie called – on the landline – to tell me she and her husband had purchased a dilapidated 1950s weatherboard house on an idyllic site in suburban bushland between Pittwater and Avalon Beach. Previously home to a chain-smoking elderly woman, and in near-original state, the house needed work. Georgie asked if I could recommend an architect for the job. Despite having another year of study to complete my university degree, and without thinking, I told her that I could do it. Of course I could! “Great!” she said.…

NEW HOUSE The term “tabula rasa,” like many sayings from ancient languages, has evolved over time. Originally describing writing tablets that have been wiped clean, the expression now commonly evokes emptiness or a fresh start. The English philosopher John Locke, largely credited with popularizing the term in his text An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, intended to describe something other than emptiness: rather, a white sheet of paper, a symbol for the starting point of human understanding upon which experience is recorded and comprehension develops. For Moloney Architects, the idyllic setting for this project, 20 minutes from Ballarat, presented a conundrum: an apparently “empty” site that belied its long history. Over its time, this 150-plus-year-old property has twice seen grand dwellings razed to the ground by bushfires, both times exposing the…

MUSEUM What would you expect from the personal home of an architectural great? Polished refinement, grandeur, a perfect floor plan? You won’t find these at the Aalto House. This is not the work of a senior starchitect, but rather the creation of two enthusiastic young Finnish designers, Alvar and Aino Aalto, who were keen to test their beliefs within the constraints of early-career means. At this cosy residence in the Helsinki suburb of Munkkiniemi, you’ll find occasional curtains in place of doors, quirkily scaled stairs that test the possibilities of brick and timber dimensions, and custom-made joinery (much of which was added years later, a pattern many on a budget will sympathize with). But you’ll also find some passion projects – including a lifelong obsession with custom-made door handles, furniture…

Earlwood is affectionately known by many locals as a hidden gem. The suburb is located a mere 10 kilometres south-west of central Sydney and is bordered by several waterways that feed into Botany Bay, lending it an almost island-like quality. Earlwood stands apart from the high property prices and limited space of nearby hipster suburbs such as Dulwich Hill and Marrickville, and it also escapes the consistently onerous heritage and development controls demanded by many of the inner-city councils. The owners of Shed House, a family of five comprising two furniture makers and their three children, initiated a conversation with Breakspear Architects after discovering and deeply admiring an earlier house executed by the same practice in a nearby suburb. That project, aptly named Courted House (see Houses 128), contains a…

OM1 AND MOBILE STUDIO by Dimensions X Entrepreneur Oscar Martin’s transition from co-founding a pop-culture news website to co-founding a prefabricated housing company with Peter Stutchbury Architecture was sparked by his experiences on the building site. After selling Pedestrian.tv to the Nine Network, he wanted to do something with his hands, so he enrolled in a diploma of building. He experienced first-hand the waste, cost and time issues that hinder traditional construction. “It was a bit of a light-bulb moment when the prefabricated wall panels arrived and suddenly it looked like a house,” he recalls. “Why isn’t everything arriving like that, pre-done?” he wondered. He put that question to Peter Stutchbury after commissioning his practice to design him a house. He recalls Peter saying that prefab had been tried before,…

There is something quite optimistic about a blue-sky Saturday morning in suburban Sydney. Cafes hum, the sun gently warms our skin, and the deep-green leaves of spotted gum trees dance in the cool breeze. It seems only fitting that I visit Brcar Morony’s A House for Grandma – an attached secondary dwelling that stretches skywards and splays outwards, creating a warm, tranquil sanctuary for independent yet interconnected generations – on just such a day. When the client came to Natalie Brcar in 2018, she brought an atypical brief that was not focused on a particular number of living spaces nor other tick-a-box amenities. Instead, her brief prioritized relationships between humans, architecture and – importantly – nature. She sought a new beginning, one that would update the existing house for her…

The owners of this new home – James, Anne and their two teenage sons – approached architect Andrew Hagemann, director of AHA Studio, having admired one of his earlier houses. James had a vision for what the house could be and presented Andrew with his own hand-drawn sketch. This drawing captured James’s ideas about how the new house might occupy the site, which overlooks the Canning River at Deep Water Point in Perth, on Whadjuk land. That original sketch is discernible in the resulting building, Andrew says, because James had the basics right in terms of orientation, position and layout. Andrew progressed these early ideas into three-dimensions, and then optimized that evolving form for passive solar design and sustainability. The architect also brought refined detailing to the project – his…