I'm Shaun Lockyer, my practice is Shaun Lockyer Architects.
We're sitting in Sydney right now, in Taylor's bay in Mosman and we're at the Mosman House. For us,
this is really a milestone project and certainly a home that reflects
the absolute best of the architectural values that we're passionate about, in an instance
where they've been executed to a level that really reflects the best of what we can do.
Coming to Mosman, we're challenged to try and understand the context of this place
in a way that we can engage with it and design a new and relevant architecture.
The Mosman bungalows, it's often referred to, has beautiful clapboards and weatherboards and
sandstone materials. We've tried to sort of extrapolate those materials and those
textures and those patinas from those traditional forms and then recalibrate that into an
architecture that is contemporary but it's still referencing the history of the past. Synergies
between landscape and water and view and all those things that come with, it was critically important
and we think that what we've come up with is a home that is genuinely a family home, a very,
very special place I think for them to form new memories and stories about their life here.
In stark contrast to having a house where one has this huge injury structure and
one gets into the building at the street and then it's kind of building, building, building the
whole way through, this is a really conscious attempt to try and disengage with building.
Will Dangar did an extraordinary job of building on the architectural themes to essentially create
a series of terraces through the site. As you come down into the house and sort of into the sunken
courtyard in the northeast corner, the house feels a little bit subservient to the landscape and in
the act of doing that, when one actually gets to the house, I guess that juxtaposition between
the natural and the man-made is then ever more overt and that's a very stark change from gravels
to these beautiful terrazzos which are highly polished slabs. It really starts to tell you a
story about the house itself. The house is really just mediating between two quite dramatic senses
of the landscape; the one more intimate, suburban aspect and the other one a much more extroverted,
hero view of Taylor's Bay in the southeastern point of Mosman Peninsula.
We were enormously lucky on this project, where we were blessed to get a team that were
very much of the same value system. County Constructions and Rob Hart and his team,
right from the design stage of the building, were on board.
Delivering quality is something that you have to work very hard to do. It's not simple. That's
what appeals to me about specialising in high-end residential construction. It's just every project,
whether it's an alteration rendition or a new build like this,
has all its own intricacies and challenges that you've got to overcome.
When you have a concrete basically superstructure, it's very unforgiving for your services and for
your electrical cables and things. If you don't get them in exactly the right spot,
I mean absolutely millimetre perfect, there is no wriggle room. In a structure like this,
you can't go back and chase the concrete and move the light. It just doesn't work, so
I think we had something like 160+ architectural drawings that literally just detailed every screw,
every nut, every bolt. There was a place for it and it was on Sean's drawings. The different
textures of the concrete in the house, basically we've got what we call off-form concrete,
which is a smooth concrete that's just simply poured. By far the biggest challenge in this
job with the concrete was the board form to the ceilings and also particularly to the staircase.
The process there is the same as off form and then you come along and lay boards just like you would
on a timber floor of a house; you wet them down to expand so there's no gaps in between the
boards and then you pull the concrete over the top and 28 days later you strip the timber off
and you hope that you get a perfect finish. It was one of those moments where you'd been
up since 3am worrying about it and by 8 o'clock in the morning half the formwork was down and and the
concrete was looking fantastic and you just had an unbelievable sense of relief and achievement.
When it comes to materials, I think the modernist leanings of me have always taken me to the natural
and in a home like this, we're lucky enough to really be able to take that to the most extreme
levels. Then juxtaposed with that quite necessary in my opinion bit of glamour.
Justine Hugh-Jones, who did all the decor and a lot of the interior design with us.
It's done an extraordinary job of layering these, at times quite hard architectural spaces
with quite expressive, quite dramatic finishes that really stand out as almost
objects of art within this otherwise very neutral palette.
Elements like the staircase, which is in the middle of what is otherwise quite a deep plan,
in this case is punctuated by a skylight over the top of the form concrete wall
and the theatre, that light against the texture of those walls, for me is very beautiful.
And then as one transitions down into that stair, it'll be hard to go past the wine cellar and when
one goes to that wine cellar as a backdrop to the living space downstairs, beautifully lit
up with exquisite lighting and a lovely pendant over a beautiful big table, it's a lot of fun.
The difference between a high-end house and a house that's super high-end like
this is just the layers of finish and the layers of coordination that go into
delivering a build with your designer, your landscape architect and of course your architect.
People would come in and say, "wow this is incredible fireplace" or "wow it's a
beautiful floor". I come in and say, "we had to put hydronic floor heating underneath,
we had to pressure test it, we had to pour 75 mils of in-situ torato after we spaced out all
of the brass strips to within a millimetre". I'll be driving down here in 30 years showing
my grandchildren that I built this house because i'm just so proud of the process and the outcome.
At the end of the day, this is a milestone project. There's a lovely sort of connection
of the narrative of what has been here for hundreds of years and what we have put here
and in the end we really feel like we've designed something here that's going to endure
all those romantic ideas about a household sits into the landscape and becomes subservient to it,
I think is paying dividends. This is a house that people will recognise a lot of love,
passion and attention to detail went into.