This house is one that doesn't give much away from the street, it is very protective and
inward looking when you look at it from the laneway it almost looks windowless.
It's very much about how you journey through the spaces and when you enter it's quite a,
a modest sized door off the laneway and then you're greeted by this large entry courtyard
like you'd see in a beautiful old Spanish building or you know large Italian building and it's just
an interesting way where we have trees that are coming up through apertures in the roof and it's
a generous space and it's this one where we park our cars but there's something about utilising
what could be a forgotten little area into something that's quite grand when you enter.
Hi my name is Andrew Piva I'm one of the directors of B.E. Architecture and for
this project I'm the project architect, it's my own home.
When the opportunity arose to purchase what is a small house on a large block of land off a laneway
and we thought this is a great opportunity for us to build a new family home. The house doesn't give
itself away immediately, it's actually designed around a whole series of small courtyards as you
enter the home, it's fairly compressed, it's darker, it's moodier, it's um got very sort of
controlled lighting with narrow shafts of skylight and very dim lit, artificial lighting but then as
you sort of tend to move through the building you then start to realise more of the spaces that are
ahead of you and you start to get a glimpse of oh there's something about this place, what are these
rooms of saturation and as you slowly move through the building then you get to that big typical
heart of the home as they call it, the kitchen and that is flooded in that Tuscan Oak, all the walls,
all the joinery, is just fully enveloped in this very warm comforting feeling and that's when you
really get a sense of okay I get what this house is about. When looking at paneling the rooms in
the Tuscan Oak, obviously sheets come in a certain length and we didn't want the room
to feel that it was machine-like and too cold and that's where we looked at changing the direction
of the veneer so it becomes more furniture-like than than just a mere cladding. As part of that
core palette of materials used in the project one of them was the Evenex Sincro Tuscan Oak and
it also had the benefit that it's already it's got the lacquer, it's got a seal on it,
it's got a texture to the grain that's very impressive the way that light glances across
it so it made it an no-brainer for us to to use this as a core joinery material in the project.
Like all jobs we've got a budget that we've got to look at, in chatting with the guys from Elton
Group which we've worked with for a long time on a lot of our projects, knowing that they had the
Evenex product that we could use which was was a lot easier for the joiner, less labor involved,
pre-sealed, also meant that we had a product where we knew the colour, stability of UV,
it just took a lot of the guess work out and enabled us to keep those core ideas and not
value manage them out. Although this project, you know it has been very highly detailed and
I like to think resolved at our end it does lend itself to a few opportunities of a bit of fun,
and that's where we've done one of our large bird ring lights that we've done a few projects now
and they're ones that we make ourselves and we're very, you know working late at night,
midnight, week before moving in, getting everything ready but it's one of those
objects that at the time I think I would have been cursing trying to get it done going why
did I do this but I look at it now and go I'm happy I've done it and the work's paid off.
The building's very rectilinear in nature but there are a few moments where it lets itself go
and some curves creep in and obviously you've got that with the the large entry curve of the
archway of the brick but you've also got that in the volume of the staircase where the ceiling
curves up to the clerestory window and draws the light in that sculptural sinewy stair wraps up
and the hand rail on top of it with its soft curved profile and it's all there cause it's
something that's lovely to to use, you want to touch it, you want to rub your hand across it,
these are all things you know turn hopefully something from a building into a home.
I like to think the house works really hard for itself, it's compact in its nature but
generous in the room sizes and similar with the brief, we've got three bedrooms for my two kids
and my wife and I but we also have family and friends that stay from inter-state so we've
got that study at the front which will double as a TV room and also a guest bed folds down,
that's all fully concealed in the wall paneling in the room and that room is sort of a great
little snapshot showing you how hard it does work at combining a whole lot of functions in
one contained area. One thing we're conscious of is when we wanted to design our bedroom which is
fully cocooned and lined in timber is wanted to have it feel more generous in its sizing
and that's where we've designed an ensuite in a particularly different way where we've housed all
the you want to call them the 'wet functions', the toilet, the shower, the bath with the large
skylight in the room they all contain its own little timber compartment if you will and that
allowed us to strip out the vanity area and put it back into another area, the bedroom,
so we could continue that Tuscan Oak paneling around in the room, the timber flooring could
then continue around in that spot and it makes the room feel more generous, it does make it feel
elevated as well but it almost makes the vanity feel like a a sideboard, or a piece of furniture
around the corner of a bedroom as opposed to you know more of a function in the bathroom.
With a lot of the European buildings that we look at, we find there is a consistent
feeling across all these projects and it's that use of a minimal selection of materials,
it focuses on one or two core materials and their texture and their colour and
that's really what defines these projects, so whether a blessing or a curse when it's
your own home, somehow you find the time to labor over everything and this has been no
exception to the rules there's been so many hand sketches of all the details, all the cameos,
all the junctions drawn on this and I hope this is a project that when you do bore down and look
at it you do get a sense of all that that hard work that's involved, it does feel rational,
it does feel balanced, well hope it does, it feels calm and that's what we've tried to get across.