i'm james garvin uh director of james garvin architecture this is
my and my family's lovely home the clavelli apartment
we've been living here now for just over a year and it's brought us great happiness
in a typical project i spent a lot of time getting to know the clients
and really getting to know the brief and and having a good understanding of the hierarchy of
needs and all of that but um when it's your own wife and um and it's yourself a lot of
the decisions become pretty obvious from the outset it's the ultimate motivation really to
really nail the project when your family is going to be the one that ends up growing up in it
first thing that i noticed was well the block itself was uh
pretty run down it had a fairly classically 1960s higgledy piggledy floorplan arrangement
but it was in this like unbelievably cool rooftop location extremely exposed to the elements and had
this like amazing kind of panoramic view from the south like you can see right the
way down to maribra and then it's just pacific ocean and all the way to bend buckler at bondi
i think the beauty of having such a intense connection with the ocean
is that with every minute that passes the light quality changes or there's something
happening out there on the water the impacts the experience of being in the apartment you know we
get these awesome sunrises first thing in the mornings probably my favorite time of the day
and we've sort of got pole position to maximize that experience being perched up on a cliff top
from a very kind of like pragmatic standpoint the opportunity was in like updating the floor
plan that represented the 1960s and bringing it into the 21st century and making it you know
current in response to the way people like to live these days the reason we chose timbro is that it's
such a great way to express craftsmanship and that's very much something that i'm drawn to is
like designing stuff that also utilizes someone else's great expertise they've outdone themselves
with this project it's a real testament to the craftsmanship and i really enjoy in all of my
projects um giving craftsmen the opportunity to strut their stuff the first thing we had to do
which was probably the most ambitious part of the project was to remove all the walls we ended up
pulling everything out completely freeing up the floor plate and then we dropped in these enormous
steel beams which carry the rest of the building each one of these beams is about weighs about
500 kilos and was craned in through through that window and it was a really hairy moment actually
when they pulled away all the props once the beams were in place and buildings stayed up
there's a really nice interface in the materials between the steel beams and the joinery
these sort of soft delicate objects and these like big massive beams that are kind of busting
their way and like bracing the whole building part of the design intent was to have this like
interplay between the structure and then the joinery as as a negotiation element you know
like where they can sort of slide past each other or into each other or through each other
the lovely thing about the bedrooms with the joining wall and the doors is that
if you want it you can have your the bedroom doors open the nursery door
open and you can still maintain that connection even though you're in like quite a private space
the successes have been from a material perspective has been watching the patina
um on the brass and the marble like evolve over time the really lovely thing about the brass in
particular is that it gets polished where you touch it and it's tarnished where you don't so
unsurprisingly the fridge door handle is the most polished handle of them all
it's just a nice way of like marking time it's embedded in the in the material
with most of my projects i sort of like to keep the the configuration and the palette
as restrained as possible and then let the clients in this case us bring our own
personality into it via opportunities for object display and artwork and furniture and stuff
if the objective of great architecture is to enrich the lives of its inhabitants then this
project i think is uh is testament to that it's been such a treat to experience this
place firsthand as the occupant and not every architect gets to live in one of their places
it's kind of reassuring to know that we've sort of got it right