Well, we're here down in Watson's Bay. I'm Nick Tobias from Tobias Partners Architects.
On this particular home, our Camp Cove House, I was the architect, the interior designer
and thankfully the client. The suburb used to be an old fishing village.
It's got a really special energy down here. Harbour on one side and ocean on the other
and much of it is actually national park. Had a number of life firsts in this area,
so the concept of moving back down to Camp Cove very much felt like coming home.
This site had an old brick house, very very pragmatic, so dark inside, lots of little rooms,
lots of corridors and I could see that as a long narrow house there was a potential to never be
far from a light source; whether that's a window or a skylight or whatever it is, so
opening up a lot of the walls internally, turning a number of the facades into bigger glazing and
more contemporary glazing just made the heart of the house really light and bright. I've got
this super sleek, beautiful Vitrocsa glazing system. Whether you're looking at a water view,
whether you're looking out to a beautiful garden, we certainly like the glazing to be
as invisible as possible. When you finish the building you hardly know it's there.
The brief that I had for myself was very much just to create a beautiful home for my two sons
and I. My boys are 12 and 14 and so they're at a perfect age to be enjoying everything
that this area's got to offer. I wanted a house that had good energy. It's a bit of a boys club;
we've each got a great bedroom, we've each got our own dedicated bathroom, we've got an epic
movie room and although the house is not huge and the floor plan is quite compact, it works
really, really hard for its size. It's very efficient and retains a sense of intimacy.
So, the house sort of has a few entries. One is on Victoria Street, one is on Cove
Street and one's further down Cove Street, which is really if you're coming in by car.
The official entrance, if you like, was on Cove Street. I had this beautiful,
big spotted gum solid front door made with a bronze handle that I absolutely love.
You turn to the left you have this beautiful lounge room that really is
north east south facing in terms of the glazing that also has one of the only
original features that I kept of the old house, which is the old brick fireplace.
Super comfy sofa in there, the whole room is surrounded by planter box, so you feel very
immersed in the landscape at the back, you've got this view out to Camp Cove Reserve. My pride and
joy is my piano which was my grandmother's. It's an upright grand steinway. It was built in 1901
so 120 years old and just sounds like velvet, it's incredible. Whether I'm jamming with the
kids or have friends over or just playing on my own, it's a beautiful room for music as well.
If you go through the front door and you turn to the right, you come into
the sort of kitchen-dining-living-garden space.
I've got these beautiful, big sliding doors that are full bleed if you like; floor to ceiling,
full width, incredibly flush details, floor junction,
ceiling junction. When they're closed the frames are like wafer thin which is fantastic.
When they're open all of those thresholds detail out beautifully with the Vitrocsa system
and then I've got this orange awning that comes out depending on what's happening with the sun.
I worked on the garden predominantly with Myles Baldwin. The overall form works really
well. Beautiful little stacked sandstone wall which has got an integrated fire pit in it.
I also wanted a garden that was predominantly native; very mixed species, quite eclectic.
There's a lower ground floor to this house which actually adds a huge amount of utility and value.
Also down there I've got a sauna built by a very passionate sauna builder, Russian guy who lives
on the south coast and we used an aspen timber which I really liked because it's very pale and
sort of in a lot of ways looks like the timber cladding that's on the outside of the house.
The upstairs is split into two sections so you come to the top of the stairs and you have this
sort of framed view straight down this little corridor and it frames a piece of the bushland
and then you peel off into the two boys bedrooms.
At the other end of the house, I've got my master suite. It feels very relaxed to be and the whole
sort of idea was that it felt like being on an outdoor terrace. So it's tiled in this
quite traditional terracotta tile. You've got this beautiful full-bleed Vitrocsa glazing in
front of it and you're sort of not quite sure whether you're inside or outside.
We've been specifying the Vitrocsa system in our practice for many years on lots of projects.
The way the system's designed and the way it fits in to buildings so seamlessly with
the cleanest possible thresholds, floor, wall and ceiling junctions; I haven't seen another brand
to date produce a system that is this refined and works so well functionally as well.
The scope of this house started as, "I've bought this house, maybe I'll just do some
paint and carpet" and then it became, "I'll do some kitchens and bathrooms"
and then it became, "I'm going to do stages one, two and three all at once". So it was evolving
really quickly, but there's also something beautiful that comes out of that process,
because sometimes you don't overthink things and some of the decisions you make are a lot more
intuitive. There can be some really beautiful outcomes that come from the speed of the process.
Maybe I'm trying to post-rationalise but it's how it came out and it feels pretty good.