The penetration of natural sunlight was one of the key parts of designing this home.
The property's only 10 meters wide,
then we played with the idea of how do we create this facade where we can
pull a sheer or a curtain to close the privacy of the occupants and then open up as we require
and so we then came up with these cylinders
and we spaced them to emulate the s-fold of a curtain and back like that so that it gives it
this sort of soft transcending feel in the evening and during the day it has this light, sort of
spacious feel as the light penetrates through, that's this gentle, concrete curtain feel.
I am Feras Raffoul from FGR Architects and I'm the lead designer for Concrete Curtain.
Toorak is positioned about five kilometers from
Southeast of Melbourne CBD, it's also known for its larger allotment sizes,
the brief of the project was to design a family home to cater for a growing family.
So we start from the Southern side of the property, we enter through a four-car garage,
that's flanked by an ensuite, a splash bathroom, the other side is a laundry,
after that we go into a study
then we follow into the entry area and the central entry area is a core part to the home and it feeds
light from the East and the West into the property and then we make our way to the lower part of
the home where the ceiling increases by a meter and that's the kitchen, dining and living area,
making its way out into the core and alfresco and rear yard area.
As we go upstairs, we position the entry / stair area in the middle of the property.
We split the upstairs private areas into two segments, we got the Master
Suite on the Northern side, so we go into the bathrooms and the stone detail that we apply,
to the bench tops, the stone fronts, into the walk-in robe and the circular skylight.
We've got three kids bedrooms, with ensuite on the southern side
and the consideration of having quite a playful colour on the floor of upstairs,
this sea of blue carpet, which is quite a nice vibrant tone to the upstairs level.
My name is Yas Bahar I'm the Victorian State manager at Artedomus and I helped
Feras and the FGR team select the finishes for the Concrete Curtain.
So some of our key design philosophies that underpin our work at Artedomus is to inspire
creative people with their ideas and designs, presenting products with enduring quality for all
of their projects. Artedomus is quite integral to the design of this home, we've used two beautiful
stones from them we've used the Quartzite and the Travertine. The stone itself has this beautiful
fresh tone during the day and then it goes into this nice warm glow, come evening time.
I've worked with Feras and FGR in the past on quite a few projects,
collaborations and just had Feras come in and look at new products we had,
so this was a natural progression for him to come to us when he was designing
this project and just have a chat that turned into something really wonderful.
So we've used travertine throughout the whole ground floor.
We've fully surrounded the kitchen, and cladded it in quartzite. To our understanding it's the
first kitchen within Australia that is fully clad in stone and all moving parts are also clad in stone.
Making sure we got the right slabs for the kitchen and there was a lot of trust there,
there was a lot of trust with the client and I feel like they were more beautiful
than they thought they were even from the photos. Quite an adventurous selection from us, it's got
a lot of movement about it, quite different to the travertine, the timber the concrete,
but it sort of nestles itself in between all these materials quite delicately.
Tactility of the materials that we've selected is vital, we've made sure that all the materials
that we selected were sort of calm to the eye and the sensation and the feel that you get walking on
natural materials such as stone, is just it's a beautiful feel and you're always connected with
the property. What I'm most proud of with this project is the actual journey and where and how
it got us here, I was really proud of the way that we were able to collaborate and communicate and
select stuff, having worked with him before I knew it was going to be an amazing result