Innehållsförteckning för Issue 161 December 2024 från Houses

In the book The Place of Houses, authors Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon and Gerald Allen write: “our experience as architects leads us to believe that houses can and should be more completely suited to the lives of their inhabitants.” This book embodies a humanistic approach, concerned with the daily rituals of people and families that make homes truly individual. It goes so far as to include a questionnaire for prospective clients, asking about everything from their bathing habits to their preferred spot for reading the newspaper. The work of American architect Moore and his collaborators was fresh in the minds of architects Jemima Retallack and Mitchell Thompson when they began designing Tree House. A careful balance of the needs of the individual, the family and the community is therefore apparent…

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This house was not just my first project as an architect in my own right, but also my first building after emigrating to Australia. The uncertainties and doubts I felt on leaving my friends, colleagues and family behind in the UK and starting a new life on the other side of the world was balanced by the confidence I could bring with me after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London and working for Norman Foster for more than four years, largely as his studio assistant on his own home. The upheaval during those impressionable years represents both the best and worst years of my life. Many might wonder about exchanging the excitement of a major global city for regional Queensland, but there were distinct advantages: wide open…

It is cold and the air is clean. Sawmill Settlement – a small community of lodges, cabins and chalets of solid timber or heavy masonry – is mostly empty when I visit in September. It is cold, but not cold enough. Located at the feet of Mount Buller, on the edge of the Alpine National Park, the settlement is engulfed by an ancient snow-gum forest and the housing primarily provides temporary lodgings for winter skiing up the mountains. There is only basic infrastructure: no grocery stores or stormwater trenches, and only a few scattered chicken-wire fences to demarcate property boundaries (or to keep the dogs in). As I slowly drive the dirt roads, there is the occasional television glow or faint muttering to remind me of other human activity. The…

In a city whose local economy is underwritten by commodities, the architects of a new house argue that the most precious of these might be found just outside. Rule Street House designed by Officer Woods Architects is situated on the high point of a narrow peninsula in North Fremantle, bounded by the Swan River to the east and the Indian Ocean to the west. The setting is suburban and the local urbanism might be described as a form of gentle density. Late-Victorian and Federation cottages set in small gardens assemble the streetscape, while native trees, sometimes larger than practical, yield deep shadow over the verge. Moving through the public realm, one has an awareness of the local topography – the lingering presence of the river and the panoramic theatre of…

In 2016, after years of living in various settings – from musty flats in London to a mid-century apartment in Brisbane’s Torbreck, which they had meticulously renovated – architect Aaron Peters and his partner, Rebecca, a scientist, purchased a cottage in Brisbane’s West End. The house, with tacked-on additions and a patchwork of primary colours inside, was a bit of a mess. Beneath the surface, termite-damaged floors and undersized joists required immediate attention, consuming their entire renovation budget and forcing them to pause progress. This unexpected delay gave Aaron and Rebecca time to reflect on their preferences and priorities, understanding the reciprocity between spaces and activities that emerge over time. Their experience with the Torbreck apartment had taught them that design cannot force a new way of living: idealised, pristine…

In the mid 1990s, I read Robert Hughes’ Culture of Complaint, a book that in many ways forewarned of the pitfalls of the identity politics we see today. Specifically, it compared a combative multicultural dialogue in the USA, based on reinforcing difference with what he saw as a more cohesive cross-cultural project in Australia. A few years later, Richard Blythe – co-founder of architecture practice Terroir alongside me and Scott Balmforth – wrote a foundational text for the practice that eschewed the Anglophone focus on objects in the landscape, embracing instead the complexity and indeterminacy that comes with a rich multicultural population. Two decades on, and Noel Pearson’s conception of Australia as a place gifted with an Indigenous heritage, a British democracy and a multicultural society, is being tested. At…

Sitting confidently on a suburban street in Toorak is the Moonbria apartment building, designed by Roy Grounds and completed in 1941. It was then, and remains today, an anomaly in an affluent neighbourhood of predominantly large, freestanding houses: a striking street elevation comprises an asymmetrical pale-brick building with long balconies and a distinctive cylindrical tower. At the time, the building prioritised the provision of affordable housing and, more than 80 years later, it offers remedies for the escalating housing concerns befuddling Australia today. Moonbria was the largest of four apartment buildings that Grounds designed within a 12-month period starting in 1940 – the others were Clendon (1940), Quamby (1941) and Clendon Corner (1941). The project was commissioned by Lady Audrey Rutherford as a build-to-rent model intended to provide affordable accommodation…

A camera obscura can be created by shutting out all light from a room’s windows and doors except for a single, small pinhole. Over a short period of time, a vivid inverse image of the outside is projected onto the interior – a living photograph of the landscape. The camera obscura is a spatial reminder of the way that architecture can be a viewfinder for how we experience our environment. Capturing a view was obviously a requirement in Atelier Chen Hung’s design for Mapleton House, situated on the eastern side of the Blackall Ranges overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Embedded into the steep terrain, Mapleton House expands in three dimensions from its western entry out to the east. The sophisticated geometry calls to mind the teak trapezoidal prism of a nineteenth-century…

When Dutch designer Ruben de la Rive Box and Australian designer Golnar Roshan first met, they were living in Amsterdam and in their early careers after graduating, Ruben from the University of the Arts Utrecht in the Netherlands and Golnar from the University of Technology Sydney. A year later, they both moved to London and worked at different high-profile design studios before deciding to start their own practice together – Rive Roshan. “We just had this desire to figure out what our vision would be, if we were to create something [on our own],” explains Golnar. So, what is that vision? Rive Roshan makes art and design objects that reflect light in interesting ways, using colour and material to play with light. The intention is to shift perspectives, encouraging the…

From the Hills hoist to the garden shed, the Australian backyard has long been a place of everyday utility. This operable canopy designed by Gab Olah revels in the possibilities of standardised components, turning ordinary fittings and off-the-shelf elements into an entirely adjustable roof system. The result is a wonderfully adaptable outdoor space that provides access to sunlight and shelter, space for drying clothes and storing bikes, and a place to play and rest. The tailored solution was created for a young family who wished to enjoy every season in their 1960s yellow-brick home in Thornbury, Melbourne. Two years earlier, when Joe and Bonnie had renovated, the “B-word” got in the way … budget! Living spaces had been reoriented toward the garden, but budget limitations meant a planned verandah had…