I love designing houses, they're really expressive of the people who commission them which I find
very exciting and always leads us to places we haven't been before. My name's Hannah Tribe,
I'm the principal of Tribe Studio Architects and we were the architect for the Venice Beach House.
Venice Beach is an area in Greater Los Angeles in the United States, it's a beachside suburb that's
historically full of colour and life and a lot of things have happened there. It's gentrifying
pretty quickly but it's still got grit and it feels urban and beach all at the same time.
California is obviously home to the Californian Bungalow,
it's a really interesting and super influential period of architecture
and homemaking, they're very expressive of their craftsmanship and it's been a really
influential style on Australian architecture as well as being prevalent in California.
The brief for this project was to design a house for a busy family of five where they
have very intense international lives and this was their Venice Beach bolthole. The brief was
for it to have a really Australian simplicity and lack of pretension and response to sunlight
and the outdoors, the other part of their brief was about the house having a sense of calm and
being a visual palette cleanser. They both work in visual fields and they spend all day using their
eyes very intensely, the idea of home was a was a rest and respite from intense visual stimulation.
So you approach the house from the street underneath this magnificent fig tree which
feels really evocative of a Port Jackson fig and from this narrow pathway we enter
into the house and the house just opens up in a kind of explosion of sunshine.
From the front door we've got a sitting room on the right hand side that opens up to a cactus
garden and a little lawn for playing, straight ahead there's a pool, on the left we walk through
the dining room, the kitchen, outdoor dining room and into a garage and guest quarters out the back.
We can loop back from the sitting room up the stairs and there's just a bank,
a really long corridor, with the bank of bedrooms along it so master bedroom,
the children's bedrooms and then at the very end is our clients work from home studio.
We've repeated timber structure throughout the ceilings of the home and at those points we
get huge voids through the first floor of the house, that allow light deep into the plant.
There are some really magnificent bits of borrowed landscape around the site, so
to the East of the site there's a huge Bougainvillea that's completely taken
over a building, and we've made a big picture window to capture a view of that and then out
the front of the house there's the gigantic fig tree, so we've made a huge window that looks
just into a wall of this magnificent green, so the window openings are really specific where
there's something that's about landscape that makes the house feel you know like
it's in this magnificent greater garden, we've really captured that in a very specific way.
There are also two elevated terraces and the landscape architects created
an idea of landscape outlook on those terraces as well.
The exterior of the house is largely charred timber cladding which has this really beautiful
velvet-like quality, it kind of, the charcoal kind of sparkles in the sun and gets very deeply
deeply black in the shadows and it's a really extraordinary material. So it's black on the
outside which really foregrounds the landscape and then the inside is kind of Australian white
what the way I think Australians love white walls because the sunlight plays so beautifully on them.
When I think about living in the Venice Beach House I think about our clients following the
sun around like cats, so they're looking for a quiet place to zip the sun on their back,
or they're playing around the pool when the full midday sun's on them, there's this idea
about the sun moving around and creating intimate and unique pockets of activity throughout the day.
I think with every project we ever do, the best and most
elevating thing is children laughing and playing in the house, and the house being such a good
domestic engine, that there's no one running around behind them telling them to clean up.
I love that the house has a casualness and a sense of fun and play to it.