i'm james garvin uh director of  james garvin architecture this is  

my and my family's lovely  home the clavelli apartment

we've been living here now for just over  a year and it's brought us great happiness  

in a typical project i spent a lot  of time getting to know the clients  

and really getting to know the brief and and  having a good understanding of the hierarchy of  

needs and all of that but um when it's your  own wife and um and it's yourself a lot of  

the decisions become pretty obvious from the  outset it's the ultimate motivation really to  

really nail the project when your family is  going to be the one that ends up growing up in it

first thing that i noticed was  well the block itself was uh  

pretty run down it had a fairly classically  1960s higgledy piggledy floorplan arrangement  

but it was in this like unbelievably cool rooftop  location extremely exposed to the elements and had  

this like amazing kind of panoramic view  from the south like you can see right the  

way down to maribra and then it's just pacific  ocean and all the way to bend buckler at bondi  

i think the beauty of having such  a intense connection with the ocean  

is that with every minute that passes the  light quality changes or there's something  

happening out there on the water the impacts the  experience of being in the apartment you know we  

get these awesome sunrises first thing in the  mornings probably my favorite time of the day  

and we've sort of got pole position to maximize  that experience being perched up on a cliff top

from a very kind of like pragmatic standpoint  the opportunity was in like updating the floor  

plan that represented the 1960s and bringing  it into the 21st century and making it you know  

current in response to the way people like to live  these days the reason we chose timbro is that it's  

such a great way to express craftsmanship and  that's very much something that i'm drawn to is  

like designing stuff that also utilizes someone  else's great expertise they've outdone themselves  

with this project it's a real testament to the  craftsmanship and i really enjoy in all of my  

projects um giving craftsmen the opportunity to  strut their stuff the first thing we had to do  

which was probably the most ambitious part of the  project was to remove all the walls we ended up  

pulling everything out completely freeing up the  floor plate and then we dropped in these enormous  

steel beams which carry the rest of the building  each one of these beams is about weighs about  

500 kilos and was craned in through through that  window and it was a really hairy moment actually  

when they pulled away all the props once the  beams were in place and buildings stayed up

there's a really nice interface in the materials  between the steel beams and the joinery  

these sort of soft delicate objects and these  like big massive beams that are kind of busting  

their way and like bracing the whole building  part of the design intent was to have this like  

interplay between the structure and then the  joinery as as a negotiation element you know  

like where they can sort of slide past each  other or into each other or through each other  

the lovely thing about the bedrooms with  the joining wall and the doors is that  

if you want it you can have your the  bedroom doors open the nursery door  

open and you can still maintain that connection  even though you're in like quite a private space  

the successes have been from a material  perspective has been watching the patina  

um on the brass and the marble like evolve over  time the really lovely thing about the brass in  

particular is that it gets polished where you  touch it and it's tarnished where you don't so  

unsurprisingly the fridge door handle  is the most polished handle of them all

it's just a nice way of like marking  time it's embedded in the in the material  

with most of my projects i sort of like to  keep the the configuration and the palette  

as restrained as possible and then let  the clients in this case us bring our own  

personality into it via opportunities for object  display and artwork and furniture and stuff

if the objective of great architecture is to  enrich the lives of its inhabitants then this  

project i think is uh is testament to that  it's been such a treat to experience this  

place firsthand as the occupant and not every  architect gets to live in one of their places  

it's kind of reassuring to know  that we've sort of got it right