Our practice endeavors to build long-lasting homes we love building family homes we think
it's the core function of the house and designing around those elements makes us really proud
my name is Taylor I'm with Taylor Pressly Architect and this is the Wimbledon House.
This particular site in Elwood is on the junction of Elwood, Saint Kilda,
Balaclava and Elsternwick, we love it for it's diversity and eclectic qualities.
In these neighborhoods it's important that
we respect and are sympathetic to the existing housing stock.
Most of the homes here have either terracotta or
slate roofs along with our deco inspired brick facade.
The spaces bookended by both the swimming pool and the landscape courtyard so there's
dual outlook in either direction always allowing for natural light.
The house is split into two levels with the principal quarters on the
ground floor as well as the kitchen, dining and living. The idea was that
the kids would live upstairs with the rumpus room, bedrooms and ensuites.
Having young kids and also a teenage boy and our family dog it was really important
to us that we focused on spatial planning and the functionality of spaces to make
sure we had spaces where we can come together as a family and we find that
that sort of differentiation in zones is a really great place for our family to live.
What we found through incorporating it a curved stair, it connected the
spaces but it also allowed us to have a double height void through that space
which allowed for a lot of light and volume to really enter into the home.
So we selected American Oak parquetry
floors in herringbone we just found that they provide a sort of nice warmth to the house that
combined with some recycled red bricks the former house that was on the block was out
of made out of red brick so we love the idea of sort of continuing that story through.
The recycled bricks we used in a stack bond format that vertical edge allowed
us to curve the bricks around tight radius' at the front facade and the
idea there was that we could invite it into the interior of the house.
We added some limestone and black timber veneer joinery throughout as well.
We love our master bedroom the fact that it's on the ground level you can wake up in the morning
put the blinds up and you can see straight through the living room and out to the pool so the view
lines are really important and are really special. Likewise you can see from upstairs to downstairs,
while we have that transparency in the view lines we also make sure that we've got soft furnishings
that allow us to close down the spaces when in the instance that we want some further privacy.
We always had a strong vision for a central heart for us which is a landscaped courtyard
that opened up to a curved stair where people could look and celebrate the house itself.
When you move into your new home before the furniture arrives, before the artwork,
there's really two feature areas of the home you've got your kitchen and you've got your
staircase so you've got this beautiful chance to make a statement of craftsmanship and integrity.
One of the biggest challenges of creating a stair like this is mathematics and
sometimes what is mathematically correct isn't going to look best to the eye so
it takes a real expert to know what's going to look good to the eye as well
as complying with the building codes and creating the best product for the client.
The thing that I think is really special about this stairs the handrail over the
102 years we've been building stairs like this that sort of handrail would
have taken us days or weeks to build and now it's the sort of
thing we can do in a couple of hours using our five-axis CNC technology.
I love the way this space behind me can just speak for itself it doesn't
need huge artworks it just uses shadow and sculpture to create an amazing look so in
the morning you've got light coming from one part which creates different shadows
and different light patches on the stair and then in the afternoon you've got a
completely different look and I think that really is an amazing part of this step.
There's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship that have to go
into the spiral stair and S&A have been able to execute it perfectly
it's a great complement to the landscape courtyard with the hit and miss brick.
Working with Taylor was was fantastic it was really collaborative he came up with some
fantastic designs that only enhanced our initial ideas I feel very fortunate with the team that we
assemble fundamentally there's just nothing change about what we did and the decisions that we made.
We set out to create a truly functional family home and we really believe we have done that.