We weren't single-minded about making a house,
we live in the building, but you can imagine a number of other uses here like a gallery, or a
restaurant, or an office and so maybe in the life of the building after we are gone and because of
its location on the edge of the city it's easy to imagine that it could be any one of those things.
Hello, I'm Ingrid Richards and I'm Adrian Spence and
we're Richards & Spence Architects and this is our home, La Scala.
We're on the edge of the city here so our back neighbours are
commercial properties so we're right at the edge where the residential starts,
it's unlike suburbs that have a kind of picturesque view back to the city
skyline we're so close to it, it's more of a foreground than our background.
We tend to entertain a lot and have our friends around us so we had to contemplate
a house that could be comfy for Ingrid and I but also hold a big group of people foreign
The site is located on the edge of quite a steep hill and we wanted to
reconcile this level change with the building format in order to maximize
the use of the external space and that was making a central yard rather than backyard.
I was chipping away at it for about four years and then we were on a flight and Ingrid pulled
out the napkin and drew the section of the house that we built and I think I sulked for a week.
Key to the planning was the idea that the front building is an independent dwelling
that has proximity to the street, there's activity, it's north facing but that the
larger southern house extends its landscape across the smaller front dwelling with this
idea that there's this extensive terrain and we're operating across the entire site.
You enter on what we've called the lower ground which takes you from garage through
to a portico which is quite moody, at that entry we gain privacy through its section
and going down into I guess the bowels of the building as opposed to a plan sequence.
The downstairs bedroom has a double height volume which is a product of its location on the side of
a hill face and it's quite beautiful. We use reeded glass for privacy which I hope works,
when you're in bed you can see the reflection of the light in the morning
and it's incredibly animated and it's a beautiful place actually to view the sky.
That middle level houses a guest bedroom, a laundry,
a bathroom that we use for parties and it's a low-height ceiling and it terminates in a
timber enclosure ceiling, walls and doors, and it's quite a cave-like experience.
It's this idea of compression in this space, it's lit by a window that looks out down
into the main bedroom, it's that variety of spatial experiences that is most important.
Spatial contrast is certainly a consideration in our work and we find it's the comparison
of high and low, light and dark, rough and smooth, that you have an emotive response to.
Most people when they arrive in the house, they bypass the middle level altogether
because you are directed towards the light.
When you arrive you're presented with a large room that looks over the city and it's quite a surprise
when you turn around and you look out into the central courtyard it's a sequence of discovery.
The building is massive and by I mean it has weight and the
plants are able to be free of those constraints.
For instance, the vines that you can see on the side of the screen they are growing inside
the building so that blurred line between outside and inside is even more blurry.
It's quite lush and again part of that surprise when you arrive from the more arid
entry sequence and then you discover this quite furtive landscape and even the zoysia hybrid,
it's a type of grass, it has its own undulations, we're not trying for perfect.
When we're thinking about materials for our projects we're imagining them
not on day one when they're finished, but we're Imagining the building in 50 or 100 years time.
We tend to use the term future ruin because we're imagining what it would be like as a
ruin from the beginning, there's a nostalgia in our city for timber and tin buildings because of
the traditional vernacular of the Queenslander and the worker's cottage but that's not always
appropriate for larger buildings and urban infill projects, so we look to other hot
weather cities for precedents where they use concrete masonry buildings in a hot climate.
When you use concrete you have the ability to make the final product feel monolithic and we
tried very hard with the pour sequence to do large single pours so that you didn't
see cold joints in the concrete, so it feels like you're in a carved-out single piece of material.
In contrast to the concrete and stone there's a schedule of brass and timber across the project,
I think the contrast of those materials heightens the experience of both.
Probably the biggest success of the project is the way it holds and manipulates light during
the day your experience in the house changes in this room the sun creeps around the corner
to the south in the afternoon and lights the back wall of the kitchen. So we've looked for
those opportunities to pull the sun into the rooms at different times of day to
animate the spaces I think for me the biggest success of the house is the social evolution
a house has changed into a shared space and I think that there has been good for me.