We are at the Glen Iris house which is
on the Bonorong and Warrawong Country of the Kulin Nations.
Glen Iris is an established suburb in Melbourne's Eastern suburbs very
leafy some beautiful plane trees down our street.
There was two main components of the brief that really excited us. The
first was this request for hard wearing materials that were true to themselves,
this really struck a chord with the kind of work we do, raw, concrete, exposed structure
the other component of the brief was a story the clients told us of a recent family holiday they'd
been on, they described floating down this river going around bends and coming into new areas,
new landscapes and just discovering the landscape that way and so it was part
of their brief to create a bit of a journey through the home.
The house is composed of three main pavilions, at the front of the property is the bedroom wing,
where all the private spaces are. Compositionally the front facade is
quite simple there's two rectangular boxes sitting on top of one another
and it's the materials we've used which have provided the beauty to these forms.
The bricks have been laid vertically and each one has been rotated 45 degrees,
to create this beautiful complex surface which the light dances across.
The front of the property faces direct west, we've used that copper screen to mediate
the light that comes in and provide that dappled light to the bedrooms.
You exit that through a little glass link and you
enter the main communal space we described as a living room barn.
Contrasting the taut brick skin of the bedroom pavilion, the living room barn reads almost
like exposed concrete ribs, and these form the phillian and delineate the spaces within it.
Within those ribs is a delicate interior of American Oak Timber,
travertine, and soft hard plaster walls,
but there are some sculptural elements that have been inserted to break up the space.
A curved breakfast nook formed out of travertine and a sculptural fireplace
sits in the middle of the living room and delineates the spaces in it.
From there you step down a few more steps into the car workshop at the back of the site. It's
not closed off from the house or outside, it's actually part of the house. The cars
we're certainly incorporated into the brief and thought of as a inherent part of the family.
The concept of having a glass link between each pavilion, it's almost like a palate cleanser,
you step out of one building into the landscape, it's quite simple,
there's no lighting and then you step into another form. You really get a sense of transitioning from
one zone to the next and you can appreciate the different materials and forms between the two.
Working on the theme of discovering new things as you move through the house which harks back
to the brief of them going down the river and discovering new environments, we wanted to create
a whole lot of surprising moments through the house. We've used a lot of concealed doors on
the project in timber batten walls where we can have this beautiful architectural
simplicity to a corridor, but also open up into a brand new space which you don't expect.
There are quite a lot of arches through the property this wasn't something that was
premeditated, it's almost something that evolved through the design process with the clients.
We've obviously used a lot of really hard, solid materials and heavy forms, but we didn't want the
house to be sombre or overbearing and the arches are part of that, they form almost
like a sense of playfulness and a bit of respite to the heaviness of the rest of the structure.
The house is externally composed of three main materials, there's the bush hammered concrete,
there's the terracotta brickwork and then there's the copper,
all of which are natural materials that are going to age really gracefully and be hard-wearing.
These materials have been really contrasted with internal materials which are a lot softer and
more refined, there's travertine floors, American Oak Timber and this beautiful soft hard plaster.
There's this sense of warmth and comfort up against this raw heavy mass of the concrete
which is a theme that we've been really interested in throughout our career and
something we explore in a lot of our projects. The different materials we've used I'm incredibly
proud of how that's all come together. It's a real testament of the builders,
the interior designer we worked with, Lisa Buxton, and our clients who put a huge amount of faith
within us. They're not materials necessarily you'd see next to one another or even materials
that you'd use internally but I think we've been able to use them really simply and make
them look quite effortless and I'm really proud of the result that's come together.