Architecture is a wonderful opportunity to see things differently,
it's a journey creating these environments and spaces and things that are not always tangible.
Hi my name's Ashley Halliday I'm the director at Ashley Halliday and my name is Rupert Lindon and
I'm an associate at Ashley Halliday Architects. Parkside's a fairly old suburb on the outskirts
of the Adelaide CBD, it's very cosmopolitan but it's got a really beautiful local heritage.
The brief for the project was a contemporary new home for a small family of three,
the family keen to actually connect with the community but also achieve privacy on a relatively
small block in its context and to really create a unique environment
where they could connect with each other but also connect to nature.
As you enter the house you sort of approach a fairly traditional front door, immediately to
the right of that is a beautiful bench seat, creates a space to activate the front garden.
There's a beautiful joinery piece as you enter the hallway which allows
you to declutter I guess as you enter the space
and a little spare room module that sits behind that for those work from home scenarios or just
get away from the rest of the family scenarios, and left hand side is immediately a master bedroom
with it's own ensuite and then there's a series of bedrooms along the one side of the property,
and then as you start to move through into the back spaces,
it's much more open and freer, a lot of overlapping and some subtle
level changes into the living spaces to try and create some space petitioning,
and some different personalities within the volumes of space.
The sunken lounge I think does a couple of things, we've repeated the materiality of
the large ceiling and brought it into the sunken lounge, brought that down into a horizontal plane
just gives you that opportunity to feel like you're retreating into a space that is a little
bit more cozy, a little bit more comfortable also we've extended that sunken lounge outdoors,
there's a corresponding sunken outdoor seating area and you can open it all right
up and create that great connection where you have this slightly more intimate drop-level.
One of the biggest features as you move right to the back of the house is that the cathedral
glass wall, which then starts to really play with people's perception of inside and outside.
One of the key strategies that we adopted quite early because it was a narrow site, we created
two wings, one wing of the building is almost hard up against the boundary and
then the other side of the building has a little bit of breathing space and breakout.
Having the two pavilions that are perpendicular to one another and pulling them apart gives
them those variety of spaces, they put a lot of effort into the landscaping native
elements within the landscaping, preserving the existing vegetation patterns on the site,
there's really quite a beautiful natural ecosystem around the fringes of this home
which actually made those interstitial spaces and moments that we've created in the house
even more enjoyable and as you move from inside to outside and and look back at the facade it's
a huge reflection of the landscape and the grass and the building almost disappeared.
The color palette is quite restrained I think we've kept it really to a few key materials,
the timber, there's the lovely Tasmanian Oak veneers,
the key external material is the brick, it's quite a warm white brick, a steel superstructure
which requires almost nothing in terms of maintenance and while there's a few extra
finishes in certain areas they really are the key elements. For us it was just about simplicity
but also bringing in lots of warmth,
but also really durable finishes as well, suitable for a family home and it'll last a
lifetime. You come and do your defects inspection and you're hammering the poor old builder to get
things done and tweaking and adjusting things and then it takes a good 12 months or two years
before you can almost detox and experience it fresh, you know it's actually quite cathartic.