Designing waterfront homes in Sydney is really tough because the sites are usually,
you know, fairly long and narrow, everybody's fighting for their piece of land by the water.
I'm Richard Peters, I'm Nick Tobias, we're both from Tobias Partners and this is our
Northbridge house and we're located here on Gadigal Land, part of the Eora Nation.
It's a very serene location just north of the Sydney CBD on Middle Harbour,
we've got a natural water course, we've got rocky outcrops, mature tree ferns which we needed to
work around and we wanted to really create a house that integrated with these natural features.
One of the critical elements to this design is dealing with the slope of the site,
it's a very long way from the street down to the harbour.
The way we've done that is you enter in what effectively feels like a one-storey pavilion,
the journey of the house from the street starts by coming over an external bridge
looking down over a big courtyard full of tree ferns then into the house the bridge continues,
You get this amazing,
sweeping horizontal view and you also get this amazing sweeping vertical
view through the garden and down to the water.
We've placed the stair right in the centre of the house and so that
vertical circulation is really important and all the rooms hang off that stair,
it's a very symmetrical type of building, very much a cube with the stair in the middle.
You've got the lounge room or living room on one side of the stairs
and you've got the dining and kitchen space on the other side of the stairs. Both those spaces
open up onto a huge balcony or terrace that face out towards the view to the Northeast.
We have an amazing pendant light in the double height space over the living space and this is
a light that was designed by Rossana Orlandi in Milan. Because it's made of brass and it has tiny
little warm LEDs in it, the light that comes from it is incredibly warm. Behind the living
room is the courtyard at the street side of the building which is a space that really gives you
an opportunity to get out of the wind, it's a very tranquil space, it's a very ornamental and
sculptural space from a landscape perspective, it reaches right up and gets that late afternoon sun.
The level below is the bedroom level, they again dial around this central staircase,
two of the bedrooms face Northeast towards the view and they're actually really quite
beautiful because they engage with the top of the tree ferns, so it's a really special outlook.
As you descend down the building, you come to the lowest living area of the house,
it is naturally a little darker but with that comes a really beautiful intimacy and you're also
much more connected directly to the garden, you sit there sometimes and you get a passing shower,
the weather's constantly changing, it's a really beautiful and settling place to be.
We worked really closely with Myles Baldwin on all of the exterior landscape architecture
and he designed a beautiful kidney shaped pool and then that leads as a
terrace level down into the garden that runs all the way down to the harbour.
Once you get down towards the water, you sort of turn around and look back
at the house and you're looking through this enchanted garden of tree ferns and
palms and curved sandstone walls and features and then at the top of it,
sitting in a landscaped curtilage is this quite formal cube of a house.
When designing a house, either on the coast or on the harbour,
one of the big considerations is obviously weather and salt spray. This house is built
predominantly of concrete and most of it's of formed concrete so it's not a painted house.
It's a beautiful finish to look at but it's also something that's incredibly durable, even the way
the timber floors are detailed you still see the expression of the concrete frame in the floor.
There's a very precise approach that we take to designing a house like this and
it's very much a kit of parts. Richard and the team go to incredible lengths to detail
this accurately and to work really closely with consultants, contractors, subcontractors alike,
to make sure it all comes together in a really precise way on site.
I think one of the things about these projects that are incredibly rewarding for us is that
we work on them for years, so to get to the end of one of these projects and to
have been involved in the architecture, the interior architecture, the interior design,
the interior decoration, to have collaborated on the landscaping,
to have worked with all of those contractors all the way through and see the whole thing
come together at the end as a holistic product, it's just incredible for us.