My name's Caroline Di Costa and I'm an architect, and my name's Adrian Iredale I'm a director of
Iredale Pedersen Hook architects, we're both the owners of this wonderful house called Casa Mia.
It's really working with a high-density form of living, in a suburban environment
and demonstrating how one can have that higher density
without sacrificing, access to light, access to ventilation, and privacy.
City Beach is close to the beach and was predominantly developed
in the early 1960s for the empire games so there's a lot of early modernist homes within the area
and we were very keen to demonstrate an alternative
to the hard-lined wall scenario of modernism
and so people start to question and go what's, what's on the inside.
For us it was important for the house to be alive
with us and our family. You spend so much time in your home
and why wouldn't you want it to be playful and why wouldn't you want to have a bit of fun with it.
The house is highly flexible and there's a series of moving devices within the house which are
simple low-tech, off-the-shelf sliding systems but they enable us to radically change space
It gives us a sense of freedom of movement,
a reduction in inhibitions, you walk around the house actually feeling alive.
The house needed to provide a presence and a facade outward, but then it also had to provide
privacy. So we originally came up quite early on with the concept of the architectural mask
The brickwork's really important to us because that stitches together the entire
spatial composition of the house, every room has a fragment of that.
Through the idea of trying to minimise waste
and through not cutting them we end up with quite a unique response and approach to the material
as much as we love the bricks that come from other parts of Australia
every brick in this house, making up these walls and this floor surface are local.
We use the colours that come from the earth here and I guess that also links
back to sustainability it does and it's supporting local industry pushing extremities in many ways.
and I think that's one of the things we also love about Brickworks, right from the very
beginning there was an interaction that continued throughout the duration of construction as well.
Brickworks were just very open-minded,
bricks traditionally can be used in a very standard way and that was not what we were going
to do from the beginning and they were always assisting us in making that become a reality.
Perth is an incredibly bright place, one of our fundamental ways
of increasing a sense of light was to work with fully glazed bricks around particular openings and
that's something we've learned through a lot of historic and ancient Japanese architecture where
moving deeper into the house we start to use darker materials to reflect light
and then as the sun does come out it's filtered and it's manipulated and it's
been very specifically permitted into the interior spaces in certain places.
The artificial light in the project allows certain elements in materiality
to be highlighted what was really important to us was using the material as it is.
There's not really a lot of finishes to the house
probably the biggest and most obvious one is the recycled jarrah that
lines our kitchen that is something that's quite traditional for Western Australia.
You'll also see where we have timber within the house other than our recycled timber it's fully
certified working with off-the-shelf sizes to minimise waste and where we needed a door
that's bigger than what was available off the shelf we simply joined a few doors together.
There is a message in this as a certain educational opportunity that items that
might talk about sustainable design should have a legibility about them as well,
that we can walk around a house and actually sense it and feel it.
Sustainability yes is a responsibility but I think sustainability also gives you back so much.
This house really does for us personally reveal how design can radically change the way in
which we interact and it can change in a way our thoughts about what architecture can possibly do
in terms of improving behaviour and health.
I'm most proud of the livability of the house and the way that we have been able to introduce
lots of different textures and materiality and the way that it all
comes together to create, at the end of the day a home which feels really good.
I've had a few favorite places and then they've changed to be somewhere else,
we recently spent 14 days in the house due to isolation requirements and the roof terrace
became a really special place at the end of the day to go up and watch the sunset.
So it's really about creating those opportunities
for how we might engage with each other and engage with our natural environment.