What we really love about the house is walking through the front door and
feeling a sense of sanctuary. You're sort of enveloped by the garden,
you feel like you're part of a naturalistic setting rather than an inner city site.
My name's Conrad Johnston. This is the SRG House. I was the architect and it's also my family home.
The house is in Balmain on the western edge of Balmain facing Iron Cove Bridge. It is an
amazing site in the sense that still retains some of the natural qualities of Balmain but
it's also in a very urban environment. So when we saw the house originally, we weren't aware
of the historical lineage of the house and also the fact that it was heritage listed, so
after we'd seen it initially we came back and did a bit more research
to discover that it was both heritage listed and also owned by Sir Roy Grounds and his son.
The condition of the house was very, very dilapidated. It had been lived in by the same
person for 30 years who had done some quite unsympathetic alterations to the house, so
it had a lot of things that were going against it, but what we really loved was just the sense
of the bushland around it, the trees and we could see that there was a real potential
to create this beautiful house that had those qualities of the 70s, had the timber work and it
related to the naturalistic setting. It's an unusual house in the fact that it's three stories,
with a replicated floor plate and the main floor where you enter into is the middle floor
and to your left is the kitchen. Adjacent to that is the dining area, which is the inbuilt furniture
and then you step through to the living space, which looks out over the water.
Unifying the whole house is a connecting stairway
which runs from the ground floor straight up to the top floor.
That will connect you downstairs into a hallway, which opens up into the boys bedrooms and then you
walk through a little kitchenette down into the living space looking out to the pool.
Downstairs in the original house was very under-utilised, so in a sense the project
was about re-imagining the ground plane to fit a lot more intense accommodation onto the site.
I suppose the house had been so significantly altered, it was sort of like an archaeological
dig where we started cutting away at this passport and finding these amazing materials behind it.
So we basically stripped it back to its concrete frame and in that process we discovered materials
in the house that were part of the original design, which were used as a cue to to what
we put back into the house; some amazing deep red tiles, a wood wool ceiling which is a really great
product that was from the 70s. So it was a more about being very judicious about what we put back
in rather than trying to overplay the materials in the house. We worked with Sonia from Limesmith;
she did a lot of research on Sir Roy Grounds, she did a lot of research on the 70s colours
and so she pushed me into selecting a whole series of really beautiful,
rich earthy colours that really related to the original materiality of the house and we
also utilised the materials to soften the sort of slightly harsh external appearance of the house.
You know some people say it's a brutalist house and some people say it's a Sydney school house,
but it's basically concrete and timber, so we've utilised the same materials but maybe done in a
more subtle way with the curve banquette seating, rich brass bench tops and a beautiful light birch
plywood joinery throughout. So in a sense it sort of de-materialises that really harsh geometry.
One of the things about the house is it faces west and south. You know the south windows made
the house very cold and the western windows made it very hot so we had both challenges
to deal with and the technology of the 70s in glass was not as it is today, so the house when
we moved into it was almost uninhabitable; so hot in summer, that we had to all move down and sleep
on the floor down at the bottom and so cold in winter we used to huddle around a fire which was
essentially like an outdoor fire. So our challenge was to do with changing the glass technology to
really high performance glass, whilst retaining the rhythm and the facade aesthetic but also make
the whole house open, so we could get that cool air to counterbalance the western heat. Well we
really love the materiality of it, we love the timber and the concrete combination.
The way the house sits in relationship with the water is really important as well because it's
an unusual grid, it's a zigzag grid rather than a very front-on house that looks straight at the
water, this house has a subtle and interesting way of relating to the waterfront position and so you
sort of get little snippets or little vignettes of the water from various places and it's been
referred to in the past as a tree house because everywhere within the house you get a sense of
the landscape and the garden beyond, so you feel like you're always sitting amongst the treetops.
One of the key parts of the house is the central barbecue which is a
charcoal barbecue, custom made by Godite Fabrication in the Central Coast.
We looked at the barbecue as an event or ceremony around the barbecue, so it's a really
key part of the family life. All of the joinery is made from birch plywood, created by a
long time collaborator Peter Zalberg, who designs and works and builds our joinery for us.
The dining table is from Koskela Design, which is a triangular shape.
It's important to the house because it creates a centrepiece for the family together but it also
allows you to sit at the house just with one other person and create a level of intimacy.
For the flooring, we've used cork which is a product called Corkwise Market Timbers
in Melbourne. It's a resilient type of flooring but has a real softness and the colouring works
really well with the project. The research for the tiles was a lengthy process and we ended up
choosing Inax tiles from Artedomus because they had this beautiful hand-built Japanese
quality to them that related to the materiality of the house. The most interesting product we've used
on the project and relates to the 70s is this wood wool ceiling. It's an amazing sustainable product
that creates a real softness in the ceiling, is very environmentally friendly as it is made from
recycled products. It also creates a really great acoustic environment within the house.