VISION 39 — HOUSE-MASTER
The Corten and layered glazing of the Louttit Bay House
produce a jewel-like luxury to eliminate the need for
extraneous façade ornament. Here the envelope says it
all with its surprise window-as-wall behind slatted fence.
His design for the earlier Dame of Melba and Inlet houses
reveals a similar beach-craft materiality. Inspired by their
settings they are tactile and sensuous with the kind
of brave, thoughtful glazing often wished for,
but rarely experienced.
His love of the ocean – he’s a surfing tragic like so
many good architects – appears to deepen, the whole
‘immersed’ in nature approach. It’s as if his houses adopt
a similar surfer’s balance and poise for surefooted results.
And no sign of interiors burdened and weighed down
with ‘stuff’. The preference always being for crafted,
un-fussed, spaces where timber and stone flow like
an infinity pool. Add to this, the extensive use of fixed
and operable glazing as generous invitation to nature,
place and dwelling.
An architect’s role is nothing if not the privilege to
share good and great experiences be it meditation
or celebration. Vision’s Peter Hyatt visited a number
of David Seeley’s projects to discover the honest,
the revealing and uplifting:
Let’s start with the Lauriston House.
Is it the result you hoped for?
DAVID SEELEY By and large it is. Architecture is art and
science and, on top of that, it's an economic consideration.
It's the way in which you meld those three to come up
with the best out of what you've got. There's definitely
a repetitious quality about the building, and that's driven,
primarily, by economy, but at the same time, there is this
artistic reflection of what surrounds it. That's the art
of what we've done, which I'm very proud of.
VISION
What does the project say about you, the client
and the place?
The heroics of our clients in actually letting us do this
can’t be underestimated. That's pretty significant. It's
also our first project away from the coast, so that's also
a milestone. The obvious point of the Lauriston House
is the roof and the way it reflects the rolling landscape.
This house appears seriously playful.
The roof shape does have that playful quality. Not
that we were initially setting out to achieve something
necessarily playful, it was more contextual, based on
the geometry of the olive plantation and the curving
nature of the vegetation and landscape. It has voluptuous
contours which is the nature of the erosion of the valleys
by the creeks and dams. That inspired the shape
of the roof.