Tabla de contenidos para Issue 152 June 2023 en Houses

NEW HOUSE The desire to go off-grid is nothing new. In modern times, it goes back at least as far as Thoreau’s Massachusetts adventures, which began in 1845. I am sure a learned reader could take the concept back even further in the cultural record (the thirteenth-century Japanese classic Hōjōki springs to mind), but this time-honoured impulse has a particular relevance in almost-post-pandemic 2023. Off Grid House by Archier is situated in bushland at the foot of a hill in north-east Victoria. The privacy of the place, and the spirited disconnect from utilities and other societal entanglements, is a large part of the appeal for its owners. The family that occupies this special house has been in the area for generations, previously on farming land. One of the owners described…

Alexa Kempton Can you tell me a little bit about yourselves and where you live? Jules Vleugel We are a family of four, and we’re deep in the throes of young family life. Before we bought this house, we had been living on the Mornington Peninsula, but after four years of commuting to the city each day for work – Rhys as a builder, and me as the owner of a retail store – we decided to move to Fitzroy North. AK What condition was the house in when you bought it? Rhys Vleugel Pretty dilapidated. Structurally, it was fine, and the front rooms were beautiful – but it hadn’t been shown much care for maybe 50 years. Which was perfect for us, as we knew we wanted an older…

When tasked with an apartment renovation, an architect is rarely afforded the opportunity to make significant spatial transformations. Limited by the base building’s structure, location of services and plan configuration, often a designer will be cornered into an approach that relies on furnishing the space with bespoke cabinetry and new material finishes, fixtures and fittings – stuff that accommodates the occupant’s lifestyle, but does not make for a meaningful architectural project. Taking a rigorously reductive approach, J. AR Office has transcended such limitations in the renovation of a 1969 apartment on the Brisbane River. Jack, a ballet choreographer, and Josh, an executive, had lived in the riverside apartment for a short time before approaching architect Jared Webb to guide the renovation process. Observing that the external glazing was in poor…

STUDIO GLASS ARTIST As a teenager, Jessica Loughlin stood outside a bus full of her fellow grade eight kids at a stop just outside Coober Pedy. Unlike most of her distracted classmates, she was mesmerized by the light and the scale of the sky. She took a photo that day, which she still references. The infinite sense of space, light and stillness in that moment is something that she continues to chase as an experience in landscape and art. Jessica trained in glass at the Canberra School of Art under Stephen Procter, from whom she learnt to respect her material and to express its essence. While still at art school, she won the Ranamok Prize (an Australian and New Zealand glass prize that no longer runs) and found an early…

Australia’s colonial cottages are a challenge in the twenty-first century. They are rare, often charming traces of the settler history of our cities and towns. They are also places to reflect on the complications of colonial home building and making here. Then, there is their reality: small, compartmentalized rooms encased in solid masonry shells – no matter how soft and crumbling the bricks – not easy to move to around, nor to extend. Harriet’s House is one of those cottages, located in central Launceston and home of Harriet Edquist, one of Australia’s most respected design historians and educators. Harriet worked with Liz Walsh and Alex Nielsen of Tasmanian practice SO: Architecture in a six-year-long process of conversation and collaboration, engaging with ideas and histories; designing, crafting and making; distilling a…

My wife and I purchased our first house in 2013. We had been unsuccessful at several previous auctions, so when the hammer dropped and we were the successful bidders, we were elated – but later that evening, elation turned to overwhelming stress when I realized the extent of the work ahead. Together with Jade, who is a construction project manager, I negotiated a long settlement so I would have time to properly plan and detail our future home. What Jade and I had purchased was not a home, however, but a dilapidated weatherboard cottage in a back street of South Melbourne. It lacked lockable doors and windows; it had extensive termite damage and a sewer vent in the living room. Celebrated artist Greg Irvine had used it as a painting…

Nestled into Eaglemont, a small suburb in Melbourne’s north, lies an unexpected little neighbourhood named Mount Eagle Estate. Designed by Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin in 1914, the estate was planned using garden suburb ideas, with long curving streets that preserved views for each residence and gave each block direct access to shared gardens. This generous approach to community and garden outlooks remains today. Homeowners Eleneth and Peter had lived on their block in Mount Eagle Estate for 32 years, but they found themselves contemplating their next steps after their four children moved out. “We started to think about what we’re trying to do for the next, hopefully, 32 years,” Eleneth says. Having decided to stay in their local community, they approached Zen Architects to design a new home…

In a quiet cul-de-sac in Castlecrag on Sydney’s North Shore, the Fishwick house by Walter Burley Griffin is approaching a century of occupation. Emerging from the sandstone ridge like a medieval rampart – stepped around boulders, blended into the landscape with natural bush gardens – it looks impenetrable, yet intriguing. As the street name, The Citadel, suggests, the escarpment on which the houses sits enjoys a commanding outlook over bush headlands, Middle Harbour and, in the distance, the Pacific Ocean. With its flat roofs and walls built largely from sandstone quarried on site, the house offers a series of spatial experiences orchestrated through controlled volume, ceiling height, natural light and outlooks. An exemplar of Walter Burley and Marion Mahony Griffin’s vision for an architecture in harmony with nature, it was…

Find more residential products: selector.com and productnews.com.au 01 Palissade collection: New variants Originally designed in neutral colours, Palissade is now available in an iron red: a rich colour that brings warmth to outdoor settings, becoming more beautiful over the years. These tables, benches, chairs and stools have been finished with a weatherproof outdoor powdercoat. hayshop.com.au 02 Haru and So These visually striking glass table lamps are a collaboration between Rakumba and Tom Skeehan of Skeehan Studio. They share a unique and cohesive aesthetic of textured, layered hand-blown glass and distinct silhouettes, making them functional works of art. rakumba.com.au 03 Big Friendly Dowel Jones’s Big Friendly range embraces comic playfulness and bold shapes. Designed by CJ Anderson in collaboration with creative duo Adam Lynch and Dale Hardiman, Big Friendly has overemphasized…

This refurbishment to an elegant 1920s home marks the first project “of scale,” as Jono Ware puts it, for his recently formed practice, Ware Architects. A composed response to a modest brief, it possesses a grace and restraint that is uncommon to early work by young practices. Situated in Gardenvale, an inner south-eastern suburb of Melbourne, the maisonette is one of two dwellings, both of which front the local high street. The owners, who for a long time lived next door, purchased the property and leased it decades ago to avoid being “built out” by future development. It was a clever move, with increasingly large developments – especially of late – now marching down the street. The purchase was also a prescient one for another, unintended, reason: the opportunity to…

At Mary Street House, Edition Office has coaxed a Federation-era house into a mesmerizingly slow process of transformation. The restraint and precision with which the architecture of the home unfolds from old to new produces a quiet and considered study in the curved edges of solid layers. The home is located on the unceded lands of the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation, but its triple-fronted site is also a microcosm of the colonial grid that overlays St Kilda, marking the intersection of a grand tree-lined boulevard, a busy main road and a narrow cobblestone laneway. The project meets the main objective of an all-too-familiar brief – to extend the house to support the evolving needs of a growing young family – but beyond this, Edition Office has taken full…

In the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s new building, the exhibition Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter explores what “home” might mean. Looking beyond the architectural, the reflections in these collected works are not confined to perfect or happy homes but also include those that are provisional, remembered, anxious, unsettled – even absent. The most arresting work in this show may be Guts (2022), an installation that uses mirrors to create the optical illusion of a skyscraper that goes on forever: not only up, but down as well. Disturbingly, the balcony “floors” and “ceilings” contain grotesque objects, including coloured plastic reptiles, toppled living room furniture and mixed-media creations that look like intestines. A response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the work is by Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden. Another impressive…