Innehållsförteckning för Issue 158 June 2024 från Houses

This issue of Houses delves into the ways that architects and designers push back against convention. The strictures of the financial system and the real-estate market often impede projects, and it takes brave clients and inventive thinking to challenge the habitual fixation on resale value. Peta’s House by Mt Eyk (page 104) – a new house for a sole occupant that includes a separate studio as a provision for earning an income – and Bob’s Bungalow by Blair Smith Architecture – an addition that opts for personality over profit (page 74) – make the case for quality over quantity. Conversations in Houses often uphold the importance of retaining our existing housing, and this issue includes the clever recoding of two 1970s houses. In Naarm/Melbourne, Fowler and Ward revives – but…

Not All Architecture – abbreviated as NAA Studio – was founded in 2019 by architect Phoebe Clarke and builder/designer Timothy Stelzer on the surf coast of southern Victoria. This unique name – which goes against the grain of more common last-name firms – clearly signals the studio’s intentions. Succinctly put by Phoebe, “it is intuitive in our thinking that architecture is not only human-centric but also considers the non-human, which includes ecology and landscape. Our practice operates with a collective approach where all elements are treated with equal importance.” The studio originally offered full services from concept to construction, where Phoebe and Tim would design the projects and Tim would build them. However, demand for their crafted services quickly outweighed the ability to construct each project and – careful to…

Martin Musiatowicz Writer Martin Musiatowicz is an architect and director of Kart Projects. He has taught at a number of architecture and design schools, and contributed to various books and publications, including A+T magazine and Art and Australia. Kath Dolan Writer Kath Dolan is a freelance journalist and communications consultant based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her design features and columns have appeared in Green magazine, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Habitus and Uppercase. Emma Brain Writer Emma Brain is the head of communications at The Fulcrum Agency, and the national marketing, advocacy and policy coordinator at the Association of Consulting Architects Australia. She is a board member at Design Freo, an event and advocacy platform that celebrates the value of good design. Traianos Pakioufakis Photographer Traianos Pakioufakis spends most of his…

Launceston has one of the most intact colonial and early Victorian cityscapes in Australia. Along the streets leading out of the city to the south – George, St John, Charles and their cross streets and small side streets – cottages and houses from the 1830s and 1840s sit cheek by jowl with larger Victorian and Federation houses as well as more recent dwellings. James Street, a short, narrow, rather steep side street in this urban quarter, is like this, beginning at the bottom of the rise with early colonial cottages and moving up the hill in chronological order. Launceston is also a brick town. One of its earliest brickfields, at Princes Square, was located a short distance from James Street and its bricks were used in the 1820s St John’s…

01 Ornament Is Not a Crime: Contemporary interiors with a postmodern twist by Rebecca Gross (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2023) In Ornament Is Not a Crime, the design mantra “less is more” is rebuffed and replaced by a delightful assortment of bold colours, daring forms and scalloped edges. Postmodernism emerged in the 1960s in defiance of the conventional design rules and rationality of the preceding modernist movement – an era that favoured functionality over expression and experimentation. The origin of the style, Rebecca Gross explains, was a form of “rebellion” against prescribed formalities. However, as the movement expanded, the mainstream market became oversaturated with “pastiche” projects and, in the 1990s, postmodernism’s popularity waned as designers renewed their interest in minimalism. This book celebrates the resurgence of the pioneering postmodernist…

Bec Snelling is passionate about ideas. She is equally passionate about centring her lighting and furniture company, Snelling Studio, around her fine arts practice. Four years ago, Snelling was part of Douglas and Bec, a successful design company she had established in 2007 with her father, Douglas. The business, based in Aotearoa New Zealand, had enjoyed a long period of growth, but was hit first by the pressures of the pandemic and soon after by a devastating fire in the workshop that destroyed their whole body of work. With Douglas also ready for retirement, Bec saw the opportunity to recast the practice. Now leading the business alone, she is intentionally working with a new model that is showroom-free. Bec describes building collections and pieces for market in the way you…

Some projects bring great challenges and, with them, the potential for great rewards. Stefania Reynolds – head of interiors and project director at Studio Johnston – faced the most demanding of clients in the design of Maddison Apartment in Sydney’s Surry Hills: her family. Like all good designers, she started the process with co-design. She asked her young son to draw what he wanted as a home. Before pen touched paper, Stefania was anxious that her son would depict a house with a gable-end roof, picket fence and garden, but, much to her surprise, he expressed home not as a piece of architecture but as all the members of the family together. Having lived and worked in Surry Hills for many years, Stefania did not want to move away from…

For the past eight years, Naomi and her now-adult son and daughter have each sought regular respite in a simple studio located at the rear of their Brunswick terrace. Naomi is an artist and primary caregiver for a daughter whose high support needs mean it’s not always feasible for the trio to live together in the weatherboard home at the front of their narrow, 193-square-metre property. While immensely grateful for the Dependent Person’s Unit (DPU) loaned to her family by charity Kids Under Cover, Naomi wanted to replace the rudimentary structure with something that would suit them in the long term. She turned to local architects Mihaly Slocombe for a higher-quality, more considered solution to the family’s changing needs, which would also maximise an underutilised garden setting and the adjacent…

Find more residential products: selector.com and productnews.com.au 01 Horizonte bed by Marcio Kogan for Minotti The Horizonte bed exhibits the formal simplicity and detailed polish that define the work of Marcio Kogan of Studio MK27. Designed for Italian furniture brand Minotti’s 75th year, Horizonte fuses strong horizontal profiles with upholstered details in leather or fabric. dedece.com 03 Lunetta stool by Sally Caroline Melbourne-based interior designer Sally Caroline has launched her first furniture range, SC Collection. The Lunetta stool features confident colour and understated forms, inspired by the Amalfi Coast. Styling: Nat Turnbull. Photograph: Lillie Thompson. sallycaroline.com 02 Table Lamp by Studio Haos Designed by Lisbon-based Studio Haos, the humbly named Table Lamp adds a warm, ambient glow to a residential space. Stainless steel, glass and plywood come together in a…

A brindle whippet greets me at the door, all dainty limbs and shining eyes. Behind her, the door’s pane of rippling glass falls somewhere between olive green and a goldy brown. Beneath her paws, tessellated tiles in brown and white step out beneath an arched portico crafted in brown brick, like so many of its peers from this era of suburban Melbourne architecture. While 1970s residences of this ilk have not always received the love they deserve, architects Tara Ward and Jessie Fowler of Melbourne studio Fowler and Ward saw an opportunity to deftly meld the nostalgic and contemporary. Like-minded clients with a well-honed design sensibility had lived in the house for a few years prior to embarking on this reimagining, and had a keen sense of what worked and…

It was one of those Perth days. A tent of blue sky, an easterly still blowing. We were still in Bunuru, the second summer of the Nyoongar six-season calendar, and everyone was hoping for signs of autumn. As I drove down the street I looked for South Perth House’s blue window awnings, which were, that day, the same colour as the sky. Simon Pendal, the architect, and Callum Spurge, his former employee – who documented the house and had returned to see it completed – waited by the front fence. “Shall we talk in the shade?” Simon suggested. The existing house is a familiar interwar, inner-suburban Arts and Crafts bungalow with squat half columns, shingled gables and leadlight windows. Typically, these houses suffer from the common malady of a dark…

We Australians are very conservative as a nation when it comes to houses ... most folk do not realize what an effect on their lives a good house can have. – Laurie Virr, April 2003 (in conversation with the homeowner). Just outside Canberra lies the quiet rural village of Murrumbateman. Predominantly populated by a mix of colonial-style structures and, more recently, the volume builds common to new development, Murrumbateman is also home to a delightful surprise in the form of an outstanding example of organic residential architecture. Stornoway, completed in 1999, was designed by architect Laurie Virr (1933–2021) in the manner that earned him great respect among those familiar with the organic style made famous by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. A building that is at once extraneous to its…