As August comes to a close, we take a look at the top 10 stories covered throughout the month.
Click on the article title to be taken to the original story, and let us know which your favourites were – or what else we should have covered.
Solutions to the housing crisis can come from unexpected places: from design competitions, from underutilised building stock – even from within the back garden.
While a garage would typically be considered adequate sleeping space for cars and not much else, Austin Maynard Architects managed to transform one on a compact, laneway-bound site into a home fit for humans.
“Melbourne is strewn with under-utilised laneways, and many homeowners are creating a second residence in their backyard with frontage to the laneway, where their adult children can live during university and early employment,” says the architect.
An iconic, heritage-listed building in Brisbane has been transformed into a nature-inspired childcare centre.
Designed by Gray Puksand, the Goodstart Early Learning Centre on Adelaide Street finds its home on level two of the old ‘Broadway on Adelaide’ building. The design for the new childcare centre makes the most of existing architecture within the building, particularly the former city mall’s central atrium skylight. The architects – along with Greenedge Design – capitalised on this internal space to create a central rooftop garden and an indoor play area.
A dwelling in the Sydney suburb of Glebe offers a space to live, work and play on a small site of only 92sqm.
Designed by U+I Building Studio, Glebe House is both residence and office space; a two-level home that sits above a self-contained studio.
At street level, the studio has its own kitchen and bathroom providing the opportunity to be either rented out separately or to live above your own workplace. An all-concrete staircase leads up to the residential part of the building, which features a material palette of concrete, timber, steel and glass.
In January 2014, a fire tore through one of Melbourne’s most well-known hospitality institutions. For the next 18 months, the site of the old Stokehouse restaurant and bar sat fenced off and unused – except by the builders who were working to bring a new vision of the venue to life.
The re-envisioned Stokehouse, open since late last year, is an entirely different building than the restored 1920s pavilion it replaces. The new build – a collaboration between Robert Simeoni Architects, TILT Industrial Design, the Van Haandel Group, and a number of interior architects – is taller, sleeker, and composed of entirely different forms and materials than the original.
What’s a beach house without ocean views? Although Dorman House, a weatherboard beach house in the Great Ocean Road tourism hub of Lorne, was “beloved” by its owners, the building was missing one key ingredient. Determined to attain the views that their home had previously lacked, the owners turned to Melbourne practice, Austin Maynard Architects, for a design that respected and conserved the shack while opening it up to the ocean.
“How could we add a clear and elevated view of the ocean without demolishing, damaging or dominating our beloved shack?” they questioned prior to giving the brief.
Like a sea-worn rock, the soft curves of Tamarama House belie the home’s robust, weather-proof character. Located on a corner site on the hills overlooking the Sydney suburb of Tamarama Beach, the design allows the house to be a sculpture on the site, while withstanding the site’s exposure to the elements.
The base of the Porebski Architects-designed home is made from stone, the heaviness of which is offset by the curved and cream-coloured façade of the upper levels. A series of timber batten extensions form bay windows against the white render masonry; a naturalistic scene that sits with the Will Dangar-designed gardens below.
Just as the tortoise beats the hare, so too does the modest beat the lavish. At least, it did at this year’s Houses Awards.
Auchenflower House by Vokes and Peters might have been an unsuspecting winner for the top accolade (the Australian House of the Year award), but it is exactly this element of surprise that the jury liked most about the project. Commenting on its “restraint and elegance” as well as its “straightforward application […] of utilitarian materials”, the jury described Auchenflower House as being “as much about what hasn’t been done as what has been done to the original home”.
Tight budget is a great driver of innovation – something that Naranga Avenue has in spades. Working with minimal materials, James Russell Architect created a village within a village; an open-ended home for extended family in Florida Gardens, “a 1960s canal estate [filled] with leathery swinging grandmas and breezeblock houses”.
The only problem with breezeblock is that it’s expensive, and so is the damage wrought on it by the corrosive coastal winds of Surfers Paradise. Instead, James Russell Architect opted for a fringe of extruded clay bricks – an inexpensive, low-embodied-energy material that doesn’t require protective coats of paint.
What’s a beach house without ocean views? Although Dorman House, a weatherboard beach house in the Great Ocean Road tourism hub of Lorne, was “beloved” by its owners, the building was missing one key ingredient. Determined to attain the views that their home had previously lacked, the owners turned to Melbourne practice, Austin Maynard Architects, for a design that respected and conserved the shack while opening it up to the ocean.
“How could we add a clear and elevated view of the ocean without demolishing, damaging or dominating our beloved shack?” they questioned prior to giving the brief.
In many architectural projects, the work of landscape architects is but a footnote at the end of a design statement. Likewise, the input of architects will often be relegated to the sidelines of a landscape architect’s project description.
Not so with the Towers Road Residence in the Melbourne suburb of Toorak. The monumental site sets a standard for what can be achieved when the inside and outside of a home are developed in simultaneity.
For the project, Woods Marsh Architects worked closely with Taylor Cullity Lethlean (T.C.L.) to create an immersive site whose impact stretched far beyond its façade.
