For over 14 years, Latitude 37, a builder of beautiful bespoke homes in Melbourne’s affluent Bayside suburbs, has been working with Monier Roofing to meet their roof design objectives.
Latitude 37 has uncompromisingly balanced beautiful design with practicality and affordability across all their projects. Their bespoke homes are not only stylish and modern, but also adapted to the sites as well as their clients’ needs. The Latitude 37 team builds about 80 new homes a year, mostly knockdown/ rebuild projects.
The Beaumaris site was chosen because of its potential to be excavated – this allowed them to create an extensive garage space for the owners’ car collection, while still adhering to the two-storey height restrictions of the Bayside neighbourhood. The design incorporated a side entrance to the home, which enabled them to include a basement space to park four cars and provide ample storage, another key requirement.
“We realised that the house would work with an entrance on the side – it does make a difference to how you design the front of the house, because you don’t need a door running through the centre of the home,” Latitude 37’s design manager Chris Sfiligoj explained.
“It also helped to maximise the accommodation in their home – and it is a 57-square house, so it’s quite sizeable. We’ve got three living spaces: a study, which both owners work at, a large alfresco area and even an extra external toilet as well.”
The bespoke Beaumaris home features a future-proof design to accommodate the growing needs of the family, which includes three teenage children: there is provision for a lift for the couple’s later years though the lift well is currently used for storage; and the floorplan includes separate areas for each generation, with sufficient room provided for the possibility of adult children living at home into the next decade.
“Another key component of the design was for the owners to have their own living area, kitchen, dining, and their master on the same level, so they just live on that space,” Sfiligoj says. “The kids are upstairs, separated. And once they fly the coop, the parents can live on just one level.”
The Beaumaris home has a contemporary façade with a striking black and white colour scheme.
The choice of roofing had a major bearing on the exterior aesthetic since the home sat high on the site and had a striking monochromatic palette. The Latitude 37 team chose Monier’s Concrete Atura tiles in Sambuca.
“We’ve been working with Monier for 14 years – it’s been a long-term relationship, and we’ve been working with them pretty much since day one at Latitude 37,” says Sfiligoj.
“For this particular site we wanted to pick something that was a darker colour tile and the Atura profile was definitely the one we wanted to go with. It has that almost flat profile, but with a slight ripple to it. With the darker colour (Sambuca), there are some sightlines for the roof where you just want a nice crisp line to work with, which is what we’ve gone for.
“We wanted to make sure that we had enough contrast between the render and cladding and the roof tile, and chose the fascia and gutter to be in the darker colour so it complements that scheme.”
Latitude 37 uses tile for the majority of their designs, because it “allows the roof to breathe, but also to house the heating/cooling”.
“Also tiles just have a more traditional look; they’re a lot softer when it comes to noise and rain and so forth, so that’s all in consideration.”
