The clients came to us with a brief for a young family.
Our intent was to create quite a clean minimal home,
focusing heavily on the natural sunlight penetrating into this home.
We then create openings within the home such as courtyards. Each room has a view
straight out onto a courtyard. By doing these courtyards throughout the whole layout, we're able
to get natural ventilation connecting throughout the whole home, which gives us the solar passive.
One of the other key features of this home
is the surprise that you get every time you do a 90 degree turn.
As you come in from the footpath, you turn 90 degrees to the front entry gate. Once you pass
that, you turn 90 degrees again and you're leading straight into the entry of the home.
The street presence of this home is quite interesting. It sits quite
low into the property. We use that to our advantage on the northern side to allow the
northern sunlight to come in. That gives it a sense of intimacy from the street.
There's this sense of what's behind that sheet of concrete.
Once you're within the property, it just opens up lovely. You actually see all the way through to
the backyard and that's one of the main features in the home; allowing your vision to see the full
depth of the property. The visual connection also gives us the ventilation that we're looking for
through this home. As we enter the front door, we have to our right side a formal living area.
It's perched over the driveway and cantilevers over the whole driveway
with a singular sheet glass. There's a nice sense of a getaway in this space.
Then we open up into the open space, living-dining-kitchen area
that all talks directly to the northern, private open space. Then we have the master
bedroom and three other bedrooms which gets itself a courtyard or a view to the backyard.
We've used that classic material palette which is concrete as our base.
We've expressed it even more in this home from the floor to be a polished concrete, mimicking
the walls as much as possible. So then we've sort of got this clean merger between the two.
The play that it has with natural sunlight still is my most enjoyable part in seeing concrete. It
has the ability to accept the sunlight in a beautiful way and create this soft tone and
texture and also come in the evening time, when you're going from this natural sunset
to the artificial light setting, there's this beautiful soft transition between the two.
Then there was the introduction of this beautiful American oak joinery. The high precision of
the joinery and the way it's been executed has really finished this home off in a sublime way.
We've then ran the same stone throughout the whole property.
We've used it in the bathrooms, we've used it in the kitchen, we've used it in the laundry
and we kept that singularity running throughout the home, which gives it its
tangible movement through the home. The stone picks up the grey from the concrete but then
the white burst within the stone, which just freshens the space up.
The effort goes into the detail on trying to gather that clean materiality,
meeting one another. We don't want the architecture to be the overwhelming part of
what's happening. We'd like it to be the subtle background,
beautiful, elegant presentation and then the clients can then bring their personality to work.
Every time I come back to this property, I enjoy the surprises that I get every time I do a turn
and just seeing those courtyards mature and grow,
that's what I find really, really satisfying about this home and the clients have seen
through our design intent in a very, very beautiful way, which is lovely to see.