Previous page: The mezzanine view takes in
the gently reflective light through clerestory
glazing with ceiling as light baffle.
13
Left: The upstairs family room leads
to two bedrooms and bathroom.
Can being open to every piece of well-meaning advice
make you vulnerable and compromise your design?
Yes, it’s very problematic. Having said that, if you’re not
a good listener you will be brought undone as well.
Don’t architects need to have something of the Little
Dictator about them. If not, then there is design by
consensus that creates the camel instead of the racehorse.
Yes that’s true. You can easily end up with an ocean of
conflicting opinions “Why would you do that? No, get out of
here.” “It’s what you wanted.” “Oh really? I didn’t want that,” It
becomes very muddy, very scrambled, very quickly.
What distinguishes this house from most of its neighbours?
This was epic to get through local planning. Neighbours
objected to the greenscapes of the back yards being built
on. We wanted our house to be identified as a separate
building, with its own lane-way address, but Booroondara
Council objected. It said we needed 67 percent of all
neighbours with houses backing onto the lane to agree and
the laneway could have the delightful name Railway Lane
despite the fact that no railways are nearby.
After two years council said no, we couldn’t name the lane.
We had to keep all this extra land to access at the front. It
was all about urban consolidation the wrong way. It should
have been, “Yes, use the back lane.” We don’t have to have
huge buildings. We can keep the Victorian buildings. We
can do all this to consolidate, without having to do big tall
buildings. The irony is I submitted it in the Booroondara
Urban Design Awards and was awarded second place in the
multi-units category.
Who or what provides your design inspirations?
Modernism is a fantastic starting point. Then there’s
everything around us that is probably the greater inspiration.
This is a small house in a big world. It’s about the flow of
spaces and a response to all of those influences that exist
in the everyday and which you try to translate efficiently
and beautifully.
There is an organic quality here, being stepped and
feathered in the way nature works where skins and surfaces
often exist as layers.
The feature window wall and stepped roof shapes the way
the daylight enters. The window patterning is taken directly
from crazed pottery glazing. It was very hard that it not
appear as resembling a spider’s web or giraffe’s skin.
The panels incorporate clerestories with water washing over
it and this brings interest to the whole building.