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They always say with great work you need three things which is a great client,
a great builder and hopefully a great architect.
It's just such a joy to come back to the property and see it after it's actually
had time to establish itself and sit more comfortably and take on
some character in terms of the colours and the growth of the landscape around
it to work in a place like this is a once- in a-lifetime opportunity.
I'm Don Bennett, the managing director of Bennett
Murada Architects and on this project I was a delivery director and co-project architect.
My name is John Wilkin, I'm a design director at Bennett Murada Architects, I was design lead
on this project and co-project architect, and we'd like to welcome you to Robinson's Run.
Robinson's Run is located on Wodi-Wodi Country which is
just outside Kangaroo Valley in New South Wales.
The site itself is about 70 acres and it is a
partially cleared rural property at the base of a beautiful escarpment.
The very original brief was to replace an existing three-bedroom house on the property,
our clients had used the property as a weekender for their growing family for
about 20-years and that building which is essentially a project home was at
an end of life and they were looking to replace it because their kids had grown
up and were using it a bit less as a family, they'd started renting it out on weekends.
The brief started to evolve as a weekender both for the family, but also for weekend stays.
You enter the back of the house through a deliberately controlled entry program
which again creates a slow reveal on the house.
We then go through an entry portal which is actually a gate, not a front door,
into an outdoor space which then creates the the diagram for the
house so you understand one side is living the other side is bedrooms.
As you come through the front door you're actually looking down the
bedroom wing through a long view along one of the rammed walls, it then radiates around to
the outdoor space which has the elevated bedroom above it through an open stair.
Where we're sitting now is the living room which is off to the
right of the main entry and again it's intended as a big open space.
Below us is a living room, another living room for children with an
arcade space and a wine seller. It's technically a games room for adults.
There's also a separate structure which our clients created initially for their own view which
is a shed structure for all their farm equipment, as well as a single bedroom living space.
We had the the joy of seeing some tenants arrive into the space and see their experience,
including our clients, who had never seen people who were renting the space come into
the space and it was really amazing to see their reaction and how people walk in and
do exactly the things we were looking to do, which is have those macro moments walk in,
wow it's amazing, it's amazing sight look at it, but then those micro moments of going oh
look at this, look at this, and you know the favourite thing for me was seeing a you know,
30s something year old guy, come in running his hand along the the rammed
earth wall saying "this is the sexiest wall I've ever seen in my life", and I kind of
went wow we've really nailed it just with that moment for me that was that was just beautiful.
The house was dropped to the ground in a bushfire at the start of 2020 and that
changed the the way we interpreted the site and our client interpreted the site
and that the site went from being fully vegetated to very barren and very open.
It completely opened the whole landscape up, so whilst the site now has regenerated in a really
beautiful and interesting way and continues to grow, for us actually losing the house changed
the way our client interpreted the site, they felt like then they didn't have an attachment
to a location on the site, an attachment to the way the building needed to be read.
So it allowed our client as well as us a little bit more freedom with the design
of the current house and the way the house sat and the way it moved through the site,
so it was actually a blessing in disguise in a way because it released some of the sort
of the design pressure off the brief and off our client's expectations.
The other effect of the bushfires was that as John said it decimated everything on the
property so it was a moonscape and as much as a tragedy as that is, it allowed our clients to
consider the site holistically and that's when they went back and reconsidered the
brief again from a modest weekender to something more like what we see today.
One of the really strong decisions we made very early was to make a house
that sat in the ground rather than the house that sat over the ground,
we made that decision quite early on before the bushfire came through but even after that it
felt like the house really wanted to be heavily grounded, heavily protected from the southwest,
whether it's from a bushfire from a thunder storm or from just a really bad weather event.
So the back of the house which faces towards the southwest is quite solid there's zinc used,
there's concrete, there's stone, it's very well protected including the rammed earth,
to the north side is much more open and generous to the space and the view.
So we made a lot of conscious decisions about how the house sat in the property as well as how it
would react to the environment around it after the bushfires when we came on to the site we saw
there was a lot of trees fallen, we were concerned about losing really valuable Australian hardwoods.
A lot of the timbers were really valuable species like bloodwood and tallowwood we
then started to build that timber back into the fabric of the building, it was a really
simple and beautiful and elegant way to build part of the story of the site back into the
new build and it's used on window linings, in door reveals, it's used throughout the building.
For this site specifically it was important to continue the story
of the site for our clients and they enthusiastically bought into the idea
of reusing the timber for that reason but on a more broad level I guess as architects
we consider ourselves custodians of a site for a short period of time.
There's buildings before this on site, and there'll be buildings after it,
so we consider this building to be part of the story of the site and if we can
find a way to stitch some of the old into it then I think that's a valuable thing to do.
So I have to say my favourite part would be this room that we're in at the moment,
in full open mode as we arrive it's the first thing we do is to open it
up and just to to experience the place exactly as per the brief.
The primary driver of the design decisions we made
was to make sure that people were here to experience the environment they were in.
Everyone who comes to this site reacts in a way which is just magical because
the place is magical and the escarpment is beautiful, the landscape is beautiful,
whether it's hot outside, cold outside, raining, beautiful sunny.
There's very much about the experience of the environment they're in so they can hear the rain,
they can smell the wild flowers, they can you know feel the walls
so it's a beautiful space in terms of just understanding the environment that you're in.
This video is brought to you by ‘10’,
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