SUPERHOUSE - architecture & interiors beyond the everyday

so for me in essence a super house is something that is beyond the everyday you know we're very used to certain conventional ways of living but clever architects can interpret the sight the brief the materials and they can deliver it in a way that is quite it takes people beyond but in a beautiful way and is very adaptive to their lifestyle we did have a certain criteria around around what we were looking for and connection to nature was actually really major and it does provide quite a thread throughout the book and the exhibition when you look at that that connection so excite was very important this 360 delivery of form was very important a great interior was important but also that it had something to hook on to conceptually so that might be an idea that was delivered through technology or through crafts and so it meant that it just had to have one central idea that took it beyond the everyday to me there are many things that would make a house a super house that would elevate it to that level and you know it can be in in terms of the location the construction the elevation the dimensions all of those things would make a house a super house but for me the really important element is the emotional one I need to have that emotional attachment to a house as well it can tick all the boxes in terms of its construction and size and everything but it needs to have an emotional appeal to me as well a super house to me is something that's actually able to stand on its own two feet and really have its own personality and its and demonstrate this kind of clear thinking and it's anything that really responds to the brief the client the context and and and create something that we haven't seen before it's it's it's uniquely relevant for that project to me is super house is a architectural perfect storm it's got everything going it's got the right materials it's got the right sides got the the right feel and I think most importantly for me it challenges the conventions of how you think a house should be and then once you get there you go I don't yeah I get this I could live here this is like the perfect space it's the space where you go it's the house that gives you envy I think the most important thing is super house should have is a place for all your old junk so that you can chuck it all in here and no one complains that it's in the living space so this is what I love the term super house I don't think has anything really to do with the design of a building I think through design houses can be super as an outcome and we would never sit down roll up our sleeves and say let's make this one a super house I think the super house is a combination between a client their brief and the architectural response to it well I think what's great about the houses in this exhibition is they just take a different perspective on everyday living and I think that's why people can identify with it they can think oh I could live like that or I couldn't you know when I talk to young Bentham about his tiny highs I said how did you deal you know with children and staff and so forth and and those are you know real issues and but they were prepared to live that way and I think it's that creativity of approach and again the openness to how things might be or could be that really helps push these concepts forward and allows you to have something that is personally super a house I visited on Sydney's Northern Beaches almost 16 years ago was probably my first encounter with a super house it was an extraordinary place designed by the architect Richard Laplace 3a and set back just from the beach hidden there amongst the palms totally dictated by by the weather and by the geography of the area the house was just to me an absolute gem and I have never forgotten it I can remember sitting there in that home as clearly today as if it was yesterday and it was just remarkable because it to me represented a whole new way of living and it was it was my entree into a whole new continent and a whole new Hemisphere and for me that was definitely a super house my super house it's the sheets Goldstein house by John Lautner and Lorton are designed the house from inside out and and and everything within it so it was a complete package and kind of sounds a little bit like a major control freak moment but you know everything the house itself including all the furnishings and little accessories are designed for it but it's an amazing achievement you know back in the 60s there probably weren't concern with them with safety like we are now I think I've seen some images of people walking around and you know being able to almost fall you know to their mercy down into the you know into the bush but we have to navigate all of these rules and regulations nowadays and still come up with something extraordinary kind of sucks I think Lautner was probably a rock star of architecture it was a bit of I don't care I just want to make it cool so what would be in my view a super house will be over maize Bordeaux house and it is you know the brief or I should decline for the house is a paraplegic person and his family and the unique nature of the briefing it has necessitated the architect that totally rethink how the house is organized Horizonte and also vertically and what I'm a did was to design a very large four by four meter platform which also acts as a room and that platform is really a lift at the same time that there's in the center of the house and it totally by putting it in the center powers it totally structures the house around that lift around that platform and in doing so does reorganizes and we thinks what a house in everything's a traditional house Dulli because of the unique nature of the brief well I think that there are so many incredible examples you know around the world but the one the one that I feel connected to you know super houses for me yeah are these traditional Island homes built you know often by the occupant and owner you know with very basic materials that have been collected salvaged from the place itself often where they there is the traces of hand at every level of making where they've you know cobbled the place together with with friends and family I think it's the fingerprints of of a human endeavor or of activity of their and that those fingerprints or traces are important because they reveal authenticity it doesn't remove the story the human story and narrative if I think places need to have a human story and narrative and they need and that's how we generate this kind of visceral response to the things it was very important to me that small spaces had cut a role to play in this exhibition as well because I think that's the the way things are trending and the ingenuity required from architects to deliver something small and powerful it is a great example of how the thinking is expressed and so in in the exhibition we have we have several great examples that are very diverse so one is in Ireland and it's the Golding summer house which is tiny and was originally built really as a sort of party house really as a dance floor cantilevered over a river it it did the winter is sort of a period of ruin and is recently being been revamped to have a more domesticated feeling that it now has a you know a bedroom and a small kitchen and bathroom but it remains this kind of wonderful museum pavilion suspended over over the river in a way that it's very unusual in Ireland particularly in that period and then on the other hand you have in a very dense urban environment you have Dominic alvaro small house which was a tremendous global success and an award-winning project and that was taking a sort of almost unbuildable tiny car park site and turn it turning it into something through clever planning and into something that was light filled and and quite beautiful yeah I mean we we've been looking in Surry Hills and we found this particular site it was a seven by six meter side but it was in a laneway it wasn't on the on a primary street and it was also adjacent a 12-story office building and it was essentially an empty car park for to two or three cars but at the same time 7 by 6 meters whilst the perception is that is actually small for me I saw that as a key opportunity and it did immediately upon visiting the site was actually this is quite substantial if you took a six by six by six volume it's quite a substantial volume and most living spaces in modern apartment buildings don't even get anywhere near six metres my first reading was well this is amazing this is huge this is a big space I could really manage this quite neatly and the fact that I was surrounded by tall buildings also gave me the confidence that actually the height won't become an issue once you get elevated over the second level it has an amazing view back to back to the CBD that started to sit where we might locate the living space and then we had a living space and entertainment and sleeping so that they just become zones and so we thought well we don't want the sleeping zone to be elevated on the rooftop we want it to be more of a sanctuary and more low down it was really about getting that living and entertainment elevated as high as we could because you move either up to the roof terrace or down to a living space or the kitchen then became this sort of hub between the three living spaces so actually low down it's quite solid the house sits there punched windows it's quite protective it is this idea of a sanctuary let you go into this concrete bunker and inside is this sanctuary of of your home in the city and then as you move out from the lower levels it just opens up to being very light very spacious the ambient daylight was tastic we actually built the house in four days because of the small footprint because of the repetition we built off-site we fabricated everything off-site we assembled it all on-site proofing prefabricated so it was you know lift one two three four and the entire house was built yeah you have to close the road and that's expensive but you're only doing there four times so we delivered a building for the cost of an apartment and delivered the finishes and all of the the value adds that I wanted in in the project so it works really hard this more like it works very hard on many levels and I think that's what makes it a super house it's not so much the super houses is super in terms of Bhrigu impressive it's about does it work for my life and Canada adapt to my changing life so I might you know have kids or kids might leave or I might feel like it at certain times I'm working a lot from home or we're out of home a lot so you know can it expand and contract with me as my as my life continues so that is something that adaptable home and that home that really suits the kind of life I I want to leave that's a super house the trunk house is located in a forest in the central highlands of Victoria it's just stringing back forests so there's almost no ground cover it's just just the trees you know quite a you know very under present canopy as well but I guess from the outset ourselves architects and the clients were keen to integrate the house into the context of the forest so that at certain points the structure of the house is almost a confusion or a blurring between the structure of the house and the trucks in the forest with the engineer pedophilic Shetty we came across the idea of using the tree trunks of our vacations to act as supporting members for the house I mean it's the kind of project where we really needed the right engineer and the right builder and the right craftsman become sculptor to put the bifurcations together you don't want it to look too rustic you know - kitsch so you get someone with the skill to be able to to work these bifurcations and join the tops and the columns which have different diameters and cross-sections to join them so it looks like a fluid form takes a lot of skill and time the house is basically you know one giant trusts so it's very strong even though the the men was a you know they're only about that that diameter they're quite thin but but very strong it's a very small house that's the size of an apartment basically because it's a weekend but we don't tend to see that as a limitation in the interior and living areas that it's all timber and that was even a conscious affect the timber lining internally on the living room walls is stringy bug so when the trees were removed to make way for the house construction it was a milling machine that came on site milled down those stringy back trees that were removed those boards were seasoned over about eight months or so they weren't exactly sure what kind of figuration would get more grain after they've been milled but we were really pleased because the grain has a lot of character so to apply the term super house to the trunk house for me is about the idea that this house is about going into a forest and developing a concept in this case using bifurcations using forms in the ecology in a very primary sense to create the concept of the house well you know the first time I looked the site up it was some it was like sort of going into God's country it's looks like this I haven't really been to any other places like that before so you sort of enter the valley and you really feel like you're in this incredibly secluded area and you also feel like you're in a very it's not only sort of more inspiring its beauty but you've got the its flanked by two large mountain ranges so you really feel like you're very safe and secure and on the side there's a creek that runs through the site and so one of the very important parts of the brief was that the house had to be sited near the creek we oriented the house along the axis that along the axis of the mountains because it was formed such a strong line it was very hard to ignore it so that that became the sort of access for the whole design and we had to incorporate to sort of stone cottages that were part of the sort of history of the site and apparently they'd been Bushrangers in the area that had hidden out quite a famous bushranger was there so we kind of felt it was very important to maintain the cottages as as part of the house I'm sort of very fascinated with the idea of grafting so the idea of grafting in in Japanese gardens where they there's an existing sort of tree and they might sort of chop it all they'll alter it in some way or they might add another piece to it and so the new piece becomes part of almost part of the whole so you wouldn't really know so that that approach was taken so that the the new part of the house sort of almost becomes part of the old part so that the two cottages are sort of framed by by the new house but they become like sort of these jewel like sort of special kind of parts of the house there's quite deep overhangs on the roofs that's really protecting you and from rain and some sort of shelter the roof of the house is angled so that they perfectly frame the mountain range so you sort of see the whole top of the mountain range see so it's not cut off halfway there sort of angling right up so that you sort of see the whole mountain range the new materials we still wanted to use something that was almost part of the site as well so even though it's a light material we used iron bark which is a reference to a lot there's a lot of iron bark trees in the area rough sawn iron bark it's used externally everything inside the house is very sort of smooth and jewel-like and we've used black but ply along the bedroom wing there's also a bit of rammed earth that we used in the house so we've used sort of local earth and did lots of experimentation with different types of rammed earth walls and the colour kind of it's quite related to the colour of the earth yeah we've also used brass mesh on all the outside sort of deck areas which give you protection from the mosquitoes and the insects and flies and that sort of thing but also enable you to look outside sort of almost like you're in your own little world but you can look out but you don't really feel like you're you're being observed yourself the surroundings become the thing that you really look at rather than the inside of the house it's almost like a sort of frame for looking for looking at the outside so the house itself has is quite zen-like and quite has a sort of sense of calm it was just great working on a project where you're in such a fabulous place it's quite a privilege to be able to design something that is really sort of particular than that area are in very special better and becomes part of the area so I think that's quite a great opportunity for an architect so we know that humans and you know you know respond to places and I think super houses are these places that we immediately feel a visceral response to we don't necessarily always know why we might think it's because of concrete or the way that a circulation space works or an incredibly crafted material but there are other aspects that are less obvious but you know as critical in terms of building a sensibility and the feeling of comfort within a space I was on the Croft house which is near Phillip Island in Victoria it's on a pre exposed part of coastline and faces east so the winds blow offshore there which makes it a bit easy because you can just face the view and have the wing behind you where I came about was I was there for three days and I didn't mind being embarrassing myself by walking like an idiot walking around and looking confused so I pretty much just did that and I knew that I was there with the owners and we were staying there in the old place that was there and and I knew they were worried healthy but on the third day looking silly and wandering around thinking I realised that a very unique thing was happening there with a weather Trey's world bending towards the ocean so the wind was coming from behind and so a scheme really needed to put its jacket up to the collar up to the wind and protect itself in that way the idea of a courtyard house was a pretty good model because you could make a protected place and so there was a few experiments of can I do a courtyard house that doesn't have redundant space in long corridors doesn't have the double-headed blinkers because the courtyard houses give me this you know shuts off all of that can i tape it off and just make it disappear hollow out the ends you know maybe a bathroom would work well in the end sure enough did work well so I understand that it seems that this is a complete thing that's been placed and then the owners have had to somehow find a way of living in this form but it didn't evolve that way I mean sure enough as that shape evolved there was long bananas washed up kind of sea cucumbers there was you know until it was practically it started as a exercising passive solar Shore and the owners don't use in heating or any cool and that works by having a lot of thermal mass furthermore inertia and well insulated and I think the form probably does a little bit for windchill these forms probably do a lot to shoot the breeze over and not really take the heat out of the building and that was part of the looking at the Croft house of hundreds you know Croft houses on the north of Scotland and ground-hugging things so this landscape is evolving in a certain way with erosion the gel and geology fertility of the ground winds and rain so what if this architecture was to look at these natural systems and try and work in with them and to have them generate the architecture so I super has to me steps away from convention and in a way it's almost endemic it's evolved in a place those kind of qualities I think we all innately really enjoy because if we go traveling it's those look at how these guys are living here you know that kind of uniqueness and it's not to say that generic modernism isn't exciting - and doesn't have a role to play but me personally interested in how it's twisted and evolved and part of a system of a place culturally and physically look I think contemporary design is is very respectful now towards tradition and towards the past and nothing excites me more than when I see a project come across my desk of a beautiful old house that has been very sympathetically restored with a modern extension I like the journey that that can take you on through the home and I actually do like it very much when there are two distinct halves to the house where the the old hat the old half the traditional half has its own distinct personality and then you sort of cross the threshold into the contemporary but it's done in a seamless way and it's done in a respectful way that really respects the heritage of the original home we suffered the design of the scholar house in 2009 it's a terrace house which is located in in Balmain and the inner-city fabric in Sydney is pretty well intact and I think it's important to remain tane the the front facade especially when they've formed out of a continuation of a row terraces I think that's very very important and not ain't it not only to maintain the the tourist hospice art but also the form of the other more the main body of the terrace house I think you know that that's very very important because what we were interested in is a counterpoint between in a traditional form the traditional facade and how that counterpoints or how that is juxtaposed against aid we're not quite a contemporary interior what we decided to do was to invert the terrace house traditionally in the two-story terrorists you know here you have the living rooms on the ground floor and the bedrooms on the top floor and we basically flipped that we put the living rooms on the top floor many to take advantage of the views towards Parramatta River toward the front of the house and also to take advantage of the sculptural reforms you know sort of sculptural skylights most terrace houses you don't see the sky because you're bounders had built up you know houses built up along the boundary so that's quite a rare experience so we wondered we wanted to be able to see the sky that was very important and our general approach you know during the design process was to really look at the housing section rather than the plan because it's all about the light coming down to the top is all about the vertical circulation as the living rooms from the top floor rather than the ground floor so as you interfere the front door you enter into a three storey high space you know poppy apply the skylights and then you rise up the flight of stairs and as you reach the top of the stairs with the living room ease your your adjacent to a lovely tree in your mother the courtyard so and that's very sort of different from a traditional terraced house experience you know the scar lie isn't just a simple device which allows light to come in it's a volumetric device which are beliefs and sculpts the space at the same time and by placing a sheet of glass on the outside the opening you eliminate the frame so the frame doesn't interrupt the view between the the inside and the outside so in our case what we were able to do by limiting it frame you get the the white roof forms juxtaposed against the blue sky so the experience is it's quite surreal you can only achieve that through the detailing by placing the painted glass on the outside of the opening you know I'm most happy with the way the life end of the house and secondly I'm very happy with the way we engage with the urban fabric and we respected the additional terrace house for money and the facade by the same time we've introduced continuous phases within the house so is that some adjusted position which were most happy we have also I was recently lucky enough to go to Richard Rogers house in Chelsea in London and talking about super houses it was extraordinary absolutely extraordinary and it's a great architect and this home represents everything that he's ever done and you walk up to it and it looks like a typical Georgian house and then you open the door it's splashes of color and so behind it is this enormous triple space white room super a per plant open planned but super livable and I think that respect from nod to the past that's what makes it bring it because you don't know what to expect he's a big name of international architecture and he said bitties own home that isn't cozy in any way but yet it is cozy because somehow his talent is to make cavernous spaces full of glass and steel and white walls feel like you could happily live there and read a paper and feel on top of the world I'm gonna talk a little bit about concrete because I'm obsessed with it there there is something about concrete in terms of its transgression as a natural material and as a man-made material but it's a capacity to sculpt and form its imperfection it's one of those things that has a reach level of patina and there is something about that tactility of materials I mean concrete but also worn you know timber that grows over time or mild steel that begins to rust it tells an authentic story it tells a story of you know of things our activities evolving over time it's not looking to and begin to transparent it tells you the truth about what it is even precast panels in that are you know formed up in factories will all have their own level of you know of patina and history and narrative and story in a steady much like the fingerprints of humans I guess the provocation of this project for us was that the client have lived on this site for many years I think 25 years we felt there was an opportunity to provide the client into doing a house that was much more suited to the collection of art that they had a substantial collection of art we challenged them or provoked them into thinking about what we could do what we could achieve if we started again on this site and as a little bonus the house next door came up for sale and so we suggested that it might be a nice idea to purchase that and instead of a going for the usual ridiculous idea of a tennis court that we actually reach a house across two sites so that was that was the start of this project for us yes I guess there are a couple of major conceptive driving forces and the site itself is one of them because it's actually almost honor honor on a cliff it's very steep site we knew we had to have something that would step down the site but we wanted the building to really contribute to the surroundings and anything it's in a context of a lot of very large very nice houses but they're all very nice as when you're inside the house and all they do to the street is create a blank wall and we've set out to really do something a lot more sculptural that could really contribute back to the street we wanted to I guess create a sculpture that was livable very important for our clients that this was not an art gallery it was a home so in a sense we wanted Pauline I wanted to create the scholar in the landscape and then show the clients how we can make we looked at many different artists we loved the goo she was one of them and against Noguchi for us had sculpture that was linked and connected and created voids and for us just beauty so you know looking at the Noguchi and we started off with this original idea about you know when you try and step something down it starts to create these holes and volumes and that actually was more about not so much even what we were building but the spaces we were creating we started to shift things around to get things to functionally work and get the towels and things to work and then finally and it was really out of responding both to the brief the sun the privacy or all those are the things that make an actual house turn something from a sculptor to a house responding to all those elements is what ended up getting us a sort of final formed twisted for the Sun and twisted for the headland view and functionally fitted all the different pieces in it so yeah I made a client happy but very important when we put the notion to them that the house could actually also be a sculpture itself in the landscape and really contribute that they were excited by that idea I don't know how many clients would be so that's true it's true credit to them fantastic that they they took it on they had the courage to do that then I think people don't read this as as a house necessarily they're looking beyond it and they're looking around it as a sculpture but even when you come inside the house and again Kali talks about the obsession with you when you come into this house you don't see with you and it was we were very adamant that you wouldn't just have that typical open the door huh you so they actually I blocked of you and turning turning Carol now : that walk Clinton's walk right I think it's history so how could you do this we've got this beautiful view and you walk into this house and you put a wall in the way but of course the viewers revealed URL so just this tiny slice them that sends you long but it's not the big well the the choice of concrete was fairly simple really because we needed a material that you would read as sculptural so roof and wall and ceiling and and surfeit it all had to be the same material now course concrete is perfect for them because you form it up in those shapes there's a real strength and solidity to it and yet there's a delicacy around it as well so the way the glass slides into the concrete even the detailing of the balustrade is this great contrast between the robust nature of the material and the delicacy of certain elements and with with the out because the art is spectacular primarily cubist realism in his contrast with this really robust building so I think it is audacious to do a house like this in this location in Sydney and then we were given an award a local council award for this house for the contribution to the built environment now that is amazing because my second said let's be honest when we bring our first meetings with the client regarding our design we weren't particularly positive about how this might be received at council so we had to say to our client look baby steps here because we might fall over the first hurdle but the house was embraced by the planners from day one and we had no problem with approval and here it is an audacious house for this part of the world official concrete is great because as I get older I realize maintenance is always an issue so you build a concrete house and you choose not to paint it all you got to do is hose it and I see I see so much beauty in concrete and why is that those great brutalist buildings that I grew up with so you know schools were brutalist the cinema was brutalist my university was brutalist and so it there's a real nostalgic feel Paul for me for Brutalism and then oh if I see it in a domestic setting I don't have a problem with it but I don't know I'm a modernist so there's there's no way I'm not gonna subscribe to the fact that you can live in a concrete box with glass windows and you know there's some soft furnishings salts everything Linda's house was conceived to be part of a very ancient landscape and the Victorian coastline is typify die secondary and tertiary June systems that give a undulation and a soft roll to the landscape and we wanted the house to be part of that not to reflect it but to be part of that landscape and in fact go further and appear as if it was built millions of years ago covered over and then eroded away and exposed like it had been part of a Skeletor remain of an ancient marine creature the brief for this house was quite an open idea there were some pragmatic things about the number of bedrooms etc that they use it as a beach house but it's more than a beach house for them the house is more of a vehicle for them to use as a family but also to use with extended family and friends so it's more of a sanctuary or a haven for them to come down and have the opportunity to be alone or with a large group of people the the design of the house is based on to a degree a sense of mystery so on arrival there's a blank wall and a door in it which is a bit like a small proscenium arch in a theatre and when you draw the curtains or open the door it exposes you to a magnificent view so there is kind of an excitement attached to that a quiet excitement on the Victorian coastline where the view is is usually where the weather comes from so we've provided North facing courtyards that are protected from the southerly weather where the swimming pool is for example so there are all different places that you go to around the house depending on climate and also that facilitates a sense of Zoning throughout the house so everyone's got privacy so it's effectively or like to boomerang shapes with a little zipper of glass between us that gives people aspect and view without others being able to look look at them through the design of a house like this you simply can't see from one end to the other there's mystery that activates your engagement with the house so the visceral quality of the body in the building is part of that mystery so that you can't necessarily know what the plan of the buildings like you actually have to be active in seeking that out and moving through the building because of the curves within the building and the timber beading we can disguise drawers so you just see the shape of the wall in a series of handles but you don't see a wall with a frame with a door in it so the sculpted form is highlighted by the use of materials I think there are dramatic moments in this house and things like the stair to the upstairs bedroom could be you know there could be a bit of Gone with the Wind in that the bathrooms are quite brightly colored they were meant to be dual like there was meant to be a touch of Hollywood maybe on the Victorian coastline I mean I walked into the bathrooms and oh I smile and I see them because there's something there is something kind of luscious about them but the materiality is quite simple the scale of the building is based on a range of activities and sometimes times our client like just the two of them might come down and so there's intimate cave-like areas where they can retreat to and feel like they're in an intimate space and also their children have their own private area so they can retire to that and they can have their friends down and go crazy in another part of the house while other things are happening elsewhere and then there's more space if other families are down here so it's designed so that if you are here alone you don't feel like you're rattling around the house there are spaces to go that you always feel comfortable in the materiality of the building does make some reference to bleach driftwood or or old whale bones but also it's in a monochromatic palette which is what our work is about every time of day it looks slightly different I think the house still looks quite fresh and there's a timelessness about it which is embedded in our work we we're not architects that respond to style or decoration on a building the building is what it is it's a sculptural form and they're designed to look better as I get older I mean if we had to drill down a super house just to three things my one of my most important would still be that the connection to site and connection to nature because that just brings something the other quality that's not always possible if you're in an urban environment and then I would say it was the the management of light because in a way that can still draw in the experience of nature even in in somewhere that it is more urban and the third one I think is is that kind of indefinable quality of poetry or something that actually when you go into a space gives you an uplifting feeling because that was another aspect that was very important these places should have a quality that is all inspiring and just to capture something that makes you feel different and I think if you if architects succeed in doing that they've really really done their job and then on that concrete house miss Eddie house I mean that's got yeah give me that now I don't care whether the children hurt themselves I just think it's just extraordinary give me time so every day beautiful beautiful basil

Channel: Sydney Living Museums

Views: 2,234,319

Rating: 4.8281684 out of 5

Keywords: Sydney, Living, Museums, Super House, Architect designed house, Australian modernism, modernism, Karen McCartney, superhouse

Id: PF138UtwRCA

Length: 44min 42sec (2682 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 20 2016