I'm Shaun
Lockyer of Shaun Lockyer Architects we're sitting at a house called Dilkera which is
a really special house for us some seven years in the making and it's a house that really embodies
the best of what we think our design is about and something that really responds to the subtropics.
To properly understand this house you really need to understand the area that
we're in which is Brisbane and ultimately Southeast Queensland and that the form of
this building is very much an expression about how we deal with an environment
where we have a lot of rain we have a great deal of heat and a lot of humidity so this
house is about those deep thresholds those sort of lovely wide eaves those protected
edges so that year round there's a sense of being able to live in the house and on
the land and not feel like you're constantly mediating between getting inside and outside.
While it's an inner city site it enjoys this incredible amenity both in terms
of the borrowed landscape on the eastern side of the block across the street from the house
where you get these lovely sort of bush views instead of looking into a neighbour and then on
the western side you've got this incredible mix of this beautiful expanse of the river looking
across to New Farm Park the PowerHouse and then to the southwest you get these views of the city.
The arrival sequence of this house has got a deliberate modernist theme to it
where there's a sort of incremental revealing of the house and what lies beyond it so when
one comes in the entry there's almost this containment of space where you come up to
the front door which is relatively solid the edges of the building pull back you
start to get these little vignettes and these views through into the landscape
through to the river and you connect with a beautiful dragon tree and water feature and
you can start to get this lovely sense the transparency that this house is all about.
As one moves into the space there's a sense of it opening up both in the
plan and in the section as we come into the space that I'm sitting now where there's this
lovely double-height space that really sort of becomes the centre of gravity in terms of the
form and the architecture of the house and it kind of orientates all the other spaces.
Mark and Tracy have some beautiful art in houses and amazing works by David Rankin
there's a beautiful work by Minnie Pwerle a very famous Aboriginal artist we do want the house to
be a canvas for the life and the personality and the expression of life within the house.
When it comes to material choice for us less is well and truly more I think the older I get
as an architect I think the more perspective I have and the more sense of clarity I have about
the more timeless and the more restrained and the more quiet architecture can be the better.
So overwhelmingly the building is off-formed concrete the base of the houses the clad with
some beautiful stone and pretty much everything else in the house is timber either the black
timber which adorns all the windows and those lovely sort of deep edges and then the filigree
is all the blonde timber which is silvers off so the house itself is a very very muted in colour.
The floor finishes from inside to outside are all consistent so
there's this lovely seamlessness between those indoor-outdoor spaces the concrete
flows through and then transitioning into this beautiful cabinetry it's on
stairs and all the balustrading and then it extends through into the furniture.
In the architecture of this house there are a number of different ways that we've
treated the edges and those are often quite deliberately characterised by how we control
light's privacy security even and really what form that takes is a whole series of
screens and edges and we often refer to them as filigree so in the eastern facade of the
house that faces the street and the garden the screens are static they've got a mixture
of scale they sort of open up to allow the landscaping to cascade through they closed
down to deal with privacy and containment and on the first floor level where the function
of the rooms are different again we've got an operable screen and aluminum that drops down
can move away completely it can articulate itself that you can really control and curate the light.
It does sit out quite distinctly different from what's around it but that's a deliberate
attempt for it to actually really engage in the landscape rather than be a dialogue about building
itself but Kash and Tristan from Greencare did an amazing job and thankfully Mark and
Tracy were really excited and recognised the importance of getting them involved.
One of the things that really characterised the landscape design here the use of all the
Xanthorias which are these beautiful grass trees
which are dotted around the garden some of them over 200 years of age
and there's some other really beautiful details that we've developed for the
first time in this project and one of those is we've actually
grounded some planters into the top of the wall and then clad them with stones
so the landscaping actually looks like it's cascading out of the wall itself.
Ultimately the most important thing for us in every project is the relationship with a
client and I really have to thank and extend you know every gratitude to Mark and Tracy
it's that quality of relationship that we hope defines us in the work that we do as architects.