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KAREN McCARTNEY has a wealth of experience in the areas of design, art and style, spanning 20 years and several continents. With an honours degree in the History of Art and English from University College, London, her first job was on British magazine _Art Monthly_. From there, Karen's passion for mid-century modern furniture, interiors and contemporary art has seen her rise through the ranks of the world's prestige media. She has written for, among other titles, British _Elle Decoration_ and _The Financial Times_. In Australia she edited _Marie Claire Lifestyle_ before becoming founding editor of interiors magazine _Inside Out_ in 2000. Married with two children, she lives on Sydney's North Shore and is Group Editorial Director at News Magazines.
1973 was a momentous year for Australian architecture. After almost two decades of turmoil, controversy and anticipation, the Sydney Opera House was opened by the Queen in October, putting Australia on the world design map in the most spectacular of ways. In the same year and in the same city, but with no fanfare whatsoever, another groundbreaking building was completed. With walls of canvas and a roof like a pair of upturned rowing sculls, Richard Leplastrier's Palm House was unlike any other in the country. Hidden from the street, it is as private as the Opera House is public, but its sense of place and sensitivity of design have helped make it an enduring favourite among architects both nationally and abroad.

The Palm House is just one of the significant houses, many of which have not been comprehensively documented before, that author Karen McCartney examines in _70/80/90 Iconic Australian Houses._ Focusing on fourteen celebrated designs, McCartney looks at each house in turn, interviewing both architects and owners, and setting their insights and reminiscences within a broader context. She discovers the influence of international greats, such as Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Kenzo Tange and Louis Kahn, as well as the more personal mentorship given by earlier generations of Australia's best on the architects featured, and their deep respect for the unique, often hostile, local landscape.

Each house study contains plans and an illustrated description of specific details associated with the architecture and interior design, focusing on such aspects as furniture, fixtures and materials. Superbly designed and richly illustrated with photographs by Michael Wee, _70/80/90 Iconic Australian Houses_ and its companion volume, 50/60/70 Iconic Houses (Murdoch Books 2007), provide a unique and invaluable guide for everyone interested in contemporary Australian architecture.
This book is dedicated to David, Mac and Ava.

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE

INTRODUCTION

THE PALM HOUSE / RICHARD LEPLASTRIER

THE KEMPSEY HOUSE / GLENN MURCUTT

THE PHILLIP ISLAND HOUSE / BARRIE MARSHALL

THE PIE HOUSE / GEOFFREY PIE

THE PALM BEACH HOUSE / KEN WOOLLEY

THE HILDEBRAND HOUSE / ROBINSON CHEN

THE GARTNER HOUSE / GABRIEL POOLE

THE GOTTLIEB HOUSE / WOOD MARSH

THE MOOLOOMBA HOUSE / ANDRESEN O'GORMAN

THE DROGA APARTMENT / DURBACH BLOCK

THE KEW HOUSE / SEAN GODSELL

THE REEVES HOUSE / PETER STUTCHBURY & SUE HARPER

THE D HOUSE / DONOVAN HILL

THE WARDLE HOUSE / JOHN WARDLE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

'Sydney Opera House roof geometry', photographed by David Moore in 1966 clearly shows the construction of the shells and how the roof tiling was resolved after much experimentation.

INTRODUCTION

'I LIKE TO BE ABSOLUTELY MODERN AND WORK AT THE EDGE OF THE POSSIBLE.' JØRN UTZON

'THESE SAILS WERE SLOWLY GROWING increment by increment, and when a friend of mine got a job with Utzon, I thought if he can, I can,' says Richard Leplastrier on witnessing the awe-inspiring structure of the Sydney Opera House begin to take shape. He wrote to Jørn Utzon and before long was part of his team, which comprised a handful of architects from Utzon's office in Denmark and a cluster of young Australian graduate architects, like Leplastrier and Peter Myers, who had the mental agility and passion to work on the project.

There are many buildings in this book that have come about almost by chance – fate's sleight of hand in a different direction, and they would never have happened at all. This is also true of the Sydney Opera House, the foundations of which were laid in a city that, in spite of the post-war influx of European migrants, felt remote and removed from the vanguard of world architecture.

Much is made of international judge, Eero Saarinen, arriving late, and supposedly pulling the Utzon design from a pile of rejects. What is probably more accurate is Saarinen's belief in the feasibility of the design – when one takes a look at his TWA Terminal at New York's JFK Airport (formerly Idlewild), his understanding of engineering advances that enable the roofline to be liberated is clear. The statement from the jurors in _The Sydney Morning Herald_ on January 30, 1957 reads: 'Because of its very originality it is clearly a controversial design. We are, however, absolutely convinced about its merits.' It also, ironically, had a bold pull-quote, as part of the article, saying, 'Cheapest to build'.

We now know it wasn't – the initial, rather naïve, estimate of 7 million dollars blew out to an eventual 102 million dollars by 1973 (the Opera House Lottery was set up to partly pay for it – the last one was drawn in 1986). Utzon, the son of a naval architect with boatbuilding in his blood, once said, 'I like to be absolutely modern and work at the edge of the possible.' That worked for a while, with many of the young Australian architects working on the project feeling completely invincible while the experimental Danish architect was in charge. But a change of State Government saw him forced to resign, leaving Australia in 1966, never to return. Australian architects led by Peter Hall finished the job, and when the Queen officially opened the building in 1973, Utzon's name was not mentioned.

Graham Jahn, in his book _Sydney Architecture_ notes that 'the scheme makes no reference to history or to classic architectural forms', and adds, 'The organic shape and lack of surface decoration have made it both timeless and ageless.'

Its sculptural form ensures it has become one of our primary national symbols, which, even when reduced to a mere artist's squiggle, still has the power, and the resonance, to say Sydney. In an age where 'brands' are global currency, it has transcended its physical state and become a positive emblem for Sydney and, by default, Australia.

'Sun patterns within the Sydney Opera House podium', photographed by David Moore in 1962, illustrates the intrinsic beauty and poetry of the building even during the early days of construction.

THE NEW RURAL

Like many great works of art it was ahead of its time and while Utzon's personality inspired a number of Australian architects, it did not produce a corresponding aesthetic. For Richard Leplastrier it was Utzon's lack of prejudice, his sensitivity to nature and his openness to new ideas that he appreciated and appropriated. By the time the Sydney Opera House opened, Leplastrier and Glenn Murcutt were beginning work on their groundbreaking projects – the Palm House on Sydney's Northern Beaches and the Kempsey House, in rural New South Wales.

These projects were rarefied one-offs made possible by a close working relationship with enlightened clients. The discreet approach of Leplastrier's house meant it was only seen by an admiring handful, and its lack of exposure has added to its mystique over the years. Murcutt's Kempsey House, on the other hand, received a significant amount of press and public attention. While the less architecturally savvy might have labelled it a shed, albeit an elegant one, the profession could appreciate its Miesian floor plan and underpinning of modernism. The public, in turn, could identify with its form and materials. There was something familiar to hold onto and within the context of the vernacular, the floor plan didn't seem so challenging. Its rural setting and its honesty of construction anchored it squarely in the bush, which resonated broadly with Australians.

In Victoria, Daryl Jackson was developing a very different type of rural homestead both in terms of philosophy and architectural outcome. Sparked by his restoration of a pioneer cottage on the property, the idea for his Shoreham House (1976–77) was, according to the architect, 'of abstracting from the lean-to shape the humble back porch or filled-in verandah to become the whole dwelling'. His timber house, untreated inside and out, ensures that a rich patina has developed over the years, and the extensive use of bush poles ('poor man's concrete post', says Jackson), corrugated iron, extensive timber trellising and an exposed brick chimney ensure that a sense of rusticity dominates. Although it is conceptually sophisticated, it is built in a spare and Spartan manner that suggests the no-nonsense approach of its country context and the make-do philosophy of rural Australia. The result, as Graham Jahn notes is 'to transform through scale reduction, the planning and forms of larger and influential educational buildings of the day, into the topology of the house'.

SOCIAL PROGRESS

Victorian architect Kevin Borland was defined by his social conscience. 'Borland always understood the basic premise of design is about social exchange. He had a very strong socialist mindset,' says Daryl Jackson, who collaborated with him on the award-winning Harold Holt Swimming Pool (1969). His philosophy brought Borland a very particular genre of work, and client, from individual houses to kindergartens and larger scale government projects such as Clyde Cameron College, Wodonga (1975–77), a union training facility for tradespeople. Bernard Brown explains in Doug Evans' very personal book, _Kevin Borland, Architecture from the Heart_ , how Bob Hawke, then union leader, persuaded prime minister Gough Whitlam to green light the project with the words, 'I've got a mate who's an architect and he is just the bloke for this little job.' When it comes to a commission in the Seventies it doesn't get more Aussie than this. Architect Norman Day describes it as 'Borland's largest and most remarkable work; it represented a vision of an Australian architecture – the rural, the working-class, self-sufficient Aussie...There are other Borlands – suburban, urbane, refined and tailored – but this building is the best architectural measure of a rough, likeable mateship that he built.' Architect Kai Chen, who sought Borland out as a mentor, notes, 'He was talking about community long before it was fashionable'.

Also in Melbourne, Graeme Gunn (2011 Australian Institute of Architects AIA Gold Medal winner) was designing public buildings, such as the assertive Plumbers and Gasfitters Union Building (1970), in the Brutalist Style, but also experimenting with cluster housing, most notably in Winter Park, Doncaster (1970–75). Seeking to emulate the success of Sydney's Pettit and Sevitt in the project home market, Gunn developed, for Victorian company Merchant Builders, five different house types from the Studio to the Terrace House, clustering them around courtyards, with the whole site integrated with significant landscaping and parklands. It was a new, considered way of looking at suburban developments. In Sydney, in a more urban context, Ancher Mortlock Murray and Woolley developed town houses in Cremorne with planning devices such as shared garaging and a swimming pool to foster community spirit.

SUBURBIA CELEBRATED

At the other end of the spectrum from Glenn Murcutt's rural modernism in New South Wales was the philosophy of Victorian architectural practice Edmond & Corrigan, established in the Seventies, with Maggie Edmond and Peter Corrigan as its principals. Corrigan made clear his views. 'I have always been an unabashed fan of the suburbs...I see them as a source of fabulous energy.' When he received the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) Gold Medal in 2003 he entitled his A.S. Hook address, 'Sunshine on the Valiant'.

The suburb was to him 'an Australian communal form with a moral imperative of its own', of greater cultural importance than the much-lauded bush in which, he admitted, he felt uncomfortable. Their 1988/89 Athan House in Monbulk is typical of Edmond & Corrigan's work and showcases their preoccupation with colour, abstraction and fractured form with bridges, balconies and decks imparting a devil-may-care, whimsical spirit. RMIT Building 8 (1991–94), in Melbourne's city centre, took many of these expressionistic concepts into the public domain to produce, in the words of Philip Goad, a 'magic castle'.

The Viney House in Hobart, Tasmania, shows Michael Viney's interest in sculptural form and the way in which a building is placed in the landscape.

MICHAEL VINEY

Gerard Reinmuth, of architectural practice Terroir, is an advocate of the work of his mentor Michael Viney. Reinmuth acknowledges that his current work 'comes via an apprenticeship with Tasmanian architect Michael Viney, who fused a commitment to Corbusian modernism with Japanese spatial techniques, geomancy and a particular reading of Tasmanian landscapes, resulting in a suite of exemplary works anchored by this heightened spatial intelligence'. The works include projects in and around Hobart in the mid-Seventies to the early Eighties – The Viney House, Cattell House and CBA House. It's easy to see why the Viney House (1975–77) is on the Australian Institute of Architects register of Nationally Significant Twentieth Century Architecture. While it adopts Corbusian themes, and the influence of such American architects as Richard Meier is clear, it remains site specific with the significance of the landscape as a guiding principle. The plan links inside and out with view lines of Mount Wellington and the Derwent River, orchestrated from key points within the house. Viney recalls how he would walk around Hobart and note the relative relationships from place to place. He was aware that the manmade object invariably took dominance in a rural setting and while, unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, he didn't feel they had to become one, he did want to establish links between the two.

Spare furnishings, openness to the landscape and planned view lines, which link the two, are signature Viney techniques.

Viney studied sculpture with Peter Taylor and these sculptural qualities are evident in his best work. Architectural historian Jennifer Taylor calls the Viney House his most accomplished work, and comments, 'Internal planning is open and space multi-layered with visual connections maintaining the continuity of the building through the various levels.' Its connection to nature is enhanced by the glazed southern wall facing the surrounding bush, and the 1500 mm dome above the bed, allowing for views of the night sky. The Viney House appeared as the centrefold of _Architecture Australia_ magazine at a time when it was hard for Tasmanian architects to be acknowledged nationally. RMIT Professor Richard Blythe notes. 'Viney's work stands out because of his ability to take a cosmopolitan view, to be concerned with the particularity of place, of the relation between a subject and the landscape beyond the immediate site while resisting the sentimentality of a regionalist approach.'

The home of Harry and Penelope Seidler in Sydney's Killara is an example of the architect's domestic work in concrete, which he went on to use in a more curvaceous way in later houses and apartment buildings. Photographed by Martyn Thompson.

A CULTURE OF LEARNING

As a longstanding professor at RMIT, Corrigan's teaching has influenced students from the 1970s to the present day, including such significant players and practices as Ashton Raggatt McDougal, Lyons, Norman Day, Wood Marsh and Ivan Rijavec. This passing on of architectural philosophies to the next generation is very strong in Australia and examples abound in this book. Leplastrier, who was taught by Lloyd Rees and influenced by Utzon, inspired Peter Stutchbury who now, along with Murcutt, Brit Andresen and Leplastrier, give master classes to students both here and, in some cases, internationally. Gabriel Poole learnt directly from the great Queensland modernist Robin Gibson and, in time, Poole was mentor to Kerry and Lindsay Clare, who met in his office. Brit Andresen, at the University of Queensland, taught Brian Donovan and Timothy Hill and Kai Chen sought out Kevin Borland as a mentor, while Kerstin Thompson worked in the offices of Robinson Chen before setting up on her own.

While each generation springboards from the last, it brings the advantage of intellectual rigour, humanity and a preparedness to break the mould. Combined with this local influence was that of the international architectural landscape. The ability to travel and experience great buildings first-hand had a serious impact.

Neil Durbach, for example, describes the life-altering experience of American architect Louis Kahn's Exeter Library. While there are many and varied influences upon the architects featured here, the names and cultures that recur are those of Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Japanese architecture (traditional and contemporary) and the Californian Case Study programme that included the work of Eames, Ellwood, Koenig and Neutra.

CONCRETE FORMS

Parallel to lightweight modernism and the theatrical inventiveness of Edmond & Corrigan ran another genre in which sculptural form took precedence.

Concrete was used in innovative ways by Harry Seidler. His early concrete buildings were quite geometric in form, but became more fluid and curvaceous (the Berman House, 1996–99) as concrete technology improved. The material began to find full expression with the dramatic abstractions of Enrico Taglietti, an Italian-born, Canberra-based, architect. His McKeown House (1965) began to push the boundaries of the material and, as public commissions followed private ones, his level of experimentation grew. During the Seventies his designs for schools exploited the properties of concrete to create inventive spaces, and his award-winning Sea Residence (1996) in Lilli Pilli, NSW, shows his passion for the plasticity of form had not waned. In 2007, Taglietti was awarded the RAIA Gold Medal.

Three significant houses featured in this book are Barrie Marshall's Phillip Island House (1983–90), Robinson Chen's Hildebrand House (1989–91) and Wood Marsh's Gottlieb House (1990–94), which all exploit monumentality and mass with very different results. The Phillip Island House, constructed in off-form concrete, is all but absorbed into its coastline context; the Hildebrand House displays audacious curves in a streetscape predominantly of fibro and timber holiday houses, while the Gottlieb House dominates its suburban site, its impassive façade refusing to give anything away. All three take on exceptional sculptural qualities, Hildebrand and Gottlieb challenging their context while the Phillip Island House all but sinks into its site. All three manage, in their own way, to defy expectation.

THE LIGHT FANTASTIC

These houses are a far cry from the drive for increasingly lightweight, open houses being designed in Queensland to accommodate the subtropical climate and embrace the land. In 1951 architect and writer Robin Boyd commented of the Mornington Peninsula that, 'this was holiday land, it was holiday time for architecture. The over anxious architect has been left in the city. Here the plans were simple and free. Buildings were able to discard their clothes, they went naked and unashamed and seemed to enjoy the sunshine.'

The spacious interior living space of the Kaiplinger House is open to an equally generous verandah protected by deep eaves.

TROPPO ARCHITECTS.

When an architect says they are designing a building to respond to climatic conditions, the result is, of course, entirely dependent on which part of this enormous continent they are working in. Melbourne, for example, like the west coast of Ireland, is said to have four seasons in one day. The challenge for the Northern Territory's Troppo Architects, particularly when working in the Top End, is to design for a monsoon cycle with its wet and dry seasons, of which cyclones, tropical downpours, extreme humidity and electrical storms form a substantial part. Glenn Murcutt, who was an early champion of the architects, encouraged the somewhat maverick firm to join the NT Chapter of the Royal Institute of Architects, and felt that they were 'focused on an authentic architecture for the tropics'.

Phil Harris and Adrian Welke were educated at the University of Adelaide and first visited the Northern Territory as part of a four-month study trip in 1977. After completing their degrees in Adelaide, there was little work to be had locally so they travelled north again to take up positions at the offices of Darwin firm Vin Keneally & Associates. The city had almost been wiped out by Cyclone Tracy in 1974 and was undergoing a building boom – there were plenty of opportunities for young architects.

The pair founded their own practice in 1981, with typical larrikin spirit naming it Troppo Architects after the rather colonial phrase 'going troppo', meaning going a little crazed by the heat. While Darwin was not a place with any significant architectural heritage, there were early 20th century buildings that Troppo admired alongside a series of 1930s houses by architect Beni Carr Glynn Burnett at Myilly Point. When visiting the Burnett House, one is struck by the level of responsiveness to climate through its lightweight construction, use of cement louvres, partition walls that don't go to full height, and banks of opening casement windows to maintain natural ventilation. The honesty of the approach appealed to the Troppo architects, who made a study of Top End housing, _Punkahs and Pith Helmets: good principles of tropical house design_ in 1982. Parallel to this research they were working on their groundbreaking Green Can house (named after the Victoria Bitter beer can), which cost $34,000 to build and was developed in response to a low-cost housing competition. Professor Philip Goad commented on it: 'Open, adaptable with lightweight exposed steel framed construction, corrugated iron cladding and timber lattice infills, the Green Can proved that Troppo's formula for architectural research had substantial merit.'

While some locals objected to what was seen as a make-do style, others embraced its appropriateness and within two years Troppo had developed a group of five houses in Coconut Grove (referred to as 'Troppoville'), each modified to suit the site and the client. Kaiplinger House (1983) best shows the deep eaves protecting the walls, the generous wrap-around verandah, the lack of internal walls to restrict airflow, the banks of louvres and the single skin construction. It feels like a house that has taken the best lessons from the past and married them with a rigorous response to the present, simply executed to produce best practice.

A drawing of Troppo's Kaiplinger House (1983), one of five individual houses in Coconut Grove or 'Troppoville' as it became known.

Elevated in the Queenslander tradition, Lindsay and Kerry Clare's Thrupp + Summers House is carefully designed to regulate sun penetration according to the time of year.

This, remarks Peter Hyatt in his book _Local Heroes_ could also be said of the Sunshine Coast. His book examines the work of three architectural firms – John Mainwaring, Kerry and Lindsay Clare and Gabriel Poole – all committed to a sensitive response to the land and the climate, a desire to avoid the gratuitously fashionable and to work with local trades and crafts people. New technologies were found and exploited to advantage with Poole's quadropod system, allowing building to take place on steep sites formerly considered unworkable. The light footprint and single-skin construction ensured there was little disturbance to vegetation. Images of Poole's Tent House, Eumundi (1990) were sent as part of the Australian exhibit at the Venice Biennale and its apparent insubstantiality, staggeringly beautiful bush setting and the playfulness of the coloured canvas 'tents' and flags delighted European and American visitors.

While 3000 enquiries came through to his office, none resulted in a direct commission. There was a fundamental feeling that a house had to be composed of bricks and mortar to be defined as such. The owner of Leplastrier's Palm House tells of inviting his bank manager to lunch in the Seventies as the house neared completion. They sat at the dining table, the retractable roof peeled back to reveal the canopy of palms, the canvas 'walls' rolled up to directly engage the garden, and he looked around him, slightly confused, and said rather bluntly, 'Where's the bloody house?' One imagines the Tent House may have garnered much the same response.

Ken Woolley's 1982 award-winning house in Paddington, NSW, is an example of a building solution in an already developed area. Built on a steep site, it appears defensible to the street but opens up to embrace light and view at the back.

INNER-CITY REVIVAL

To date, the projects outlined here have been rural, coastal and suburban – houses with plenty of space to breathe. From the Seventies, the sensibility around inner-city living began to change as conservation movements within local residential areas, and within the profession itself, began to spring up. The Sixties building boom meant that little regard had been given to the value of nineteenth century buildings, many of which were lost in the wave of enthusiasm for the new.

As gentrification took place in key inner-city suburbs, the requirement for architectural services grew. The Osborne House in Melbourne's South Yarra was a fine example of the maintenance of a nineteenth century façade while architect Neil Clerehan created a modernist clean sweep of the interior, skilfully incorporating an art gallery and living space. Peter Stronach's work for Allen Jack + Cottier on the Victoria Street Apartments (1979) in Sydney's Potts Point showcases how 1897 terraces could maintain their exterior character while concealing open-plan living with white walls. 'The main work on the terraces was completed in 1980 and the absence of a rigid, conservationist approach denotes changes in the attitude towards the intrusion of new work in old building,' wrote Jennifer Taylor. This was something of a game-changer and has become the solution for many to inner-city family living. The 'opening up' of the terrace and the semi has probably brought more work to architects and builders than the individual house in recent years. This solution is not without its detractors and Timothy Hill of Brisbane architects Donovan Hill is troubled by the ubiquity of the 'ki-di-li' (kitchen, dining and living space rolled into one), defending the versatility of the traditional Queenslander with its non-specific rooms and ability to be easily serviced from underneath.

Elegant white spaces such as those by architects Engelen Moore defined much of what it was to be cutting-edge in Nineties Sydney. Their Price O'Reilly House (1995) in Sydney's Redfern was engineered to be as much photo studio as it was a home, with the clean, modernist aesthetic married with the functionality of a full-height stacking door system allowing easy access for equipment and furniture. The Davis House (1997) in Darlinghurst shows how a three storey Victorian terrace can be reinvented around the firm's mantra of 'space, light, ventilation'.

Katsalidis' beach house at St Andrews Beach on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula combines hardwood timbers, glass and rusted Cor-ten steel in a muscular expression of the manmade within a natural context.

NONDA KATSALIDIS

Nonda Katsalidis is inextricably linked with Melbourne, the city he has called home since emigrating from Athens with his parents in the mid-Fifties. While some architects champion the bush and others suburbia, it is in the urban landscape that Katsalidis has made his most fundamental of marks.

Educated at the University of Melbourne and RMIT, he initially avoided traditional practice, instead gaining an understanding of the construction industry. His first jobs were car parks. 'I did not have the kinds of clients who worried about aesthetics,' he says. This experience was to marry with his interest in materials – their textures, and how they combine, weather and perform. The St Andrews Beach House (1991–92), a retreat for his family, is one example, and described by Philip Goad as a 'washed up cargo crate'. Katsalidis acknowledges it is a 'very tough, very primal house...Fundamentally it is an Australian house.'

Disused wheat silos were revitalised by Katsalidis in the Silo Apartments in inner Melbourne. Arrowhead balconies, with rusted steel balustrades, create a dramatic effect.

The start of the 1990 recession coincided with Melbourne City Council's 'Postcode 3000' initiative for the revitalisation of the inner city using both existing and new buildings. Katsalidis had developed tower blocks mixing residential and office space, such as 171 Latrobe (1991), but the Melbourne Terrace Apartments (1994) catapulted his career to the next level. The sculptural exterior, with oxidised copper panels, off-form concrete, jagged vertical edges and large figurative sculptures by Peter Corlett, tapped into a general shift in the population towards the inner city. Commercially it was a success. The Silo Apartments followed in 1996. Four silos in inner-city Richmond were fashioned into generous apartments, one per floor, with spectacular city views. Theatrical flourishes such as the upstanding eaves – like a tiara fashioned for a _Mad Max_ movie – and the arrowhead balconies declare its artistic intent and make a statement about who you are should you choose to live there. Katsalidis maintains that 95 percent of what he does is for practical reasons and, as an example, explains that the Silo Apartments balconies were shaped to maintain the views of adjacent properties.

Neville Quarry said of Katsalidis: 'He began outside the mainstream and the stream is now catching up with him. He is courageous. He seems to produce different results for every job. He doesn't repeat his own clichés.'

'WHEN SOMETHING IS FIRST OF ALL INHABITED, THAT IS NOT ITS MOST BEAUTIFUL STAGE.' RICHARD LEPLASTRIER

The notion of New York–style loft living and of adapting commercial spaces for domestic use as apartments started to gain currency and with it came a change in the social make-up of the inner city. Daniel Droga (owner of Durbach Block's Droga Apartment) moved into a warehouse apartment in Sydney's Surry Hills in the early Nineties and recalls not even being able to buy a carton of milk locally. Now the area is home to some of Sydney's best restaurants.

WHEN A HOUSE FITS

This book deals with residential projects and, as such, only tells part of the story of architecture in Australia. Many of the architects featured have produced major works: office blocks, university departments, cultural centres, churches, embassies, hotels and government buildings. Yet there is merit in the exploration of the house as it distils architectural concepts into something we can all directly relate to. Richard Leplastrier talks of the 'fit' of a house with its client, and poetically describes a house as an 'outer garment for their lives'. What strikes me about all these houses is that the fit is exceptional. Of course, it is not so unusual when the architects are their own client, and can drive their own agenda unimpeded. Seven houses in the book fall into this category and although Pie and Woolley have subsequently sold their holiday houses, the rest remain in the ownership of the architects. Murcutt did not design the Kempsey House for himself but made it his own with additions when he bought it in 1980. Again, Donovan Hill created the house for a client and then, subsequently, Timothy Hill became a tenant. Five remain with the original clients and in a world were the trading of houses can be as regular as every two years, this is remarkable. So what guarantees a great architectural house? Gabriel Poole said that 'good clients get good houses', and it is true. I met and interviewed the clients and although very different people they had certain traits in common – a generosity of spirit, open-mindedness and an implicit trust in the architect and the process. All have, to this day, maintained great relationships. So while this book celebrates the work of the architects, it also pays tribute to the role of the enlightened client without whom the outcomes would have been very different. According to Leplastrier, 'When something is first of all inhabited, that is not its most beautiful stage at all. It is only after it has been used with love that something gets to be deeply beautiful.'

The Davis House (1997) by Engelen Moore shows how reinvention is possible within the context of a classic row of inner-city terraces. The steel spiral staircase and expansive use of glass makes a dramatic statement at the rear of the building while maintaining a traditional façade. Photographed by Ross Honeysett.
1973–1975 THE PALM HOUSE
RICHARD LEPLASTRIER

The rear of the house as seen through the palm trunks shows the fine timber work and canvas panel sitting below the roof of corrugated copper.

A ceramic bowl by Anders Ousback sits in front of the richly textured rammed earth (pisé) wall that runs through the house.

'LEPLASTRIER HAS A DEEPLY ROOTED MINIMALISTIC APPROACH TO HIS WORK. HE MAKES NO UNNECESSARY MOVES. LESS IS ALWAYS MORE. HE BELIEVES IN SIMPLIFIED SPACES THAT GIVE ROOM FOR THINGS TO HAPPEN AND NATURE TO ENTER.'

GUNNEL ADLERCREUTZ, JUDGE IN THE INTERNATIONAL SPIRIT OF NATURE WOOD ARCHITECTURE AWARD, 2004

The entrance echoes the aesthetic of Japan, illustrated by the sensitive placement of the stone steps and the simplicity of the sliding timber door set in the pisé wall.

The entrance is purposely low and dimly lit in contrast to the height and openness of the living space beyond. The woven timber panel to the right allows filtered light through and serves to delay, momentarily, the visual experience of the space to come.

RICHARD LEPLASTRIER'S PALM HOUSE HAS been called many things – an upside-down boat in the middle of paradise; a garden shed; a shelter; a precious object, a splendid curiosity; the most impractical house in Australia; the most beautiful house in Australia. Impracticality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder and its owner of 35 years appreciates the latter and sees no need to acknowledge the former. He notes that, right from the beginning, he experienced 'excitement at what I had rather than looking for lack in the building'.

He continues: 'When Leplastrier first visited the site, we were sitting with him in the garden, amongst the palms, and he looked at the trees and said, "You have got your house, here is the canopy." It was very much his first response – that the house was already there and from that point us working together was something of a foregone conclusion.' The plan also came to Leplastrier with ease, and even before the drawings were done he had the scheme in his head. 'He knew to insert the house between the trees on the southern boundary, to enclose the garden with a wall and, while the house should be as frail as possible, there would be a strong sense of floor and wall. The roof should be – if breathtaking is too extreme a word – at least it should defy the rules of frailty,' explains the owner.

Nature and the outdoor life have long been pleasures of Leplastrier. 'He told me his earliest childhood memory was driving with his family towards the Blue Mountains and seeing the change in the horizon as the mountains rose up around Penrith,' says the owner. His father's job with Caltex Oil Company meant the family moved many times while Leplastrier was growing up. His formative years, from nine to 14, were spent in Hobart. 'We lived in a little house looking right down Storm Bay. I had my own dinghy and dad had a sailing boat. I used to catch fish and sell them to local pubs. I even had a rifle and would shoot rabbits.' While this life gave him a love of nature, Leplastrier points out that his parents were conventional. 'Mum was a nice middle-class North Shore girl and as a family there were no pretensions to the arts, music or reading.' Those influences were to come later and with great significance.

Studying architecture at the University of Sydney brought him into contact with his first real mentor, drawing teacher Lloyd Rees, who was to become a lifelong friend. 'Wednesday was art day and he would take us out to look at the city,' says Leplastrier. 'He loved landscape and had a passion for architecture.'

After university he worked with architect Don Gazzard and followed the Opera House construction with interest. 'These shells were slowly growing, increment by increment, and when a friend of mine got a job with Utzon, I thought, if he can I can.' He remembers, late one evening, writing on a piece of old butter paper with a 6B pencil, 'Dear Mr Utzon, I have been out (of university) for a couple of years. I just admire your work so much. I hardly know anything. I would love to work for you.' Interestingly, many years later architect Peter Myers was looking through Utzon's correspondence in the Mitchell Library in Sydney and found Leplastrier's letter. He noticed that it was smudged across the bottom in such a way as to indicate that Utzon had rubbed his finger over the words to check that Leplastrier had used a really good quality 6B pencil.

Fortune was on his side in other respects. Both Utzon and Leplastrier lived in Bayview, on Sydney's Northern Beaches, where Leplastrier was building his first house for the Halford family. Utzon saw it and liked it very much. Leplastrier had also spotted Utzon examining his little sailing boat – a moth – but was too shy to introduce himself. When Leplastrier got the call to go to the Opera House there was no interview – he was employed by Utzon's right-hand man Mogens Prip-Buss on the spot. 'When we were confronted with all those amazing problems, there was never a sense that we couldn't do it, because we had Utzon on our side,' says Leplastrier.

He saw in Utzon 'a man utterly without prejudice – meaning before judgment – he approached everything without prejudice.' Leplastrier also witnessed the process of simplification that Utzon went through when designing a house for himself at Bayview. 'It took five years and five drawers of drawings. It had an incredible impact on me,' he says.

The next phase of his learning took him to Japan where he studied under Professor Tomoya Masuda, an architect and philosopher. Here Leplastrier learnt about things other than the Japanese aesthetic – he learnt an appreciation both of the clear floor plan from which a building grows and of the importance of the origin of things. When Masuda visited the Palm House as a work in progress he instantly knew the origin of the design. 'Ah, you have discovered the palm tree,' he said. The owner also recalls how Masuda had come from Peter Muller's house at Whale Beach and commented that while Muller's house was built to view the sea, this one was built to hear it.

After study, Leplastrier landed a job in the office of acclaimed architect Kenzo Tange. It was a tough time. Still only 26 years old, he taught English in a girls' high school for two hours before working a 10- to 12-hour day in the architectural practice. He then returned to his tiny tearoom in a temple. 'It was in that room I learnt about scale and harbour,' he says. While he worked with some of the greatest architectural minds in Japan, he had to come to terms philosophically with the Japanese trait of indirectness. 'It was a small office – maybe 15 people – and problems were discussed around and around. I was young and a bit brash and they were very patient with me. They sought harmony, not conflict.'

After a year of this intense, measured existence, he bought a motorbike, fitted it with long-range tanks, packed a small bag of spare parts and some sketchbooks and set off. His eight-month trip took him through India, Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Europe, finishing in London where he worked in an architectural practice for a year.

His return to Australia in 1970 was a troubling time. He was a young man with a finely tuned artistic temperament who had been exposed to great minds and great works of enormous cultural diversity. It took him five years, he says, 'to steel myself against our abrasive cultural qualities. I was unbelievably sensitive and Australia seemed so blunt.'

What inspired him, and gave him emotional sustenance, was a growing understanding of nature in general, and the significance of the Australian landscape in particular. 'I came to Lovett Bay to live in 1971/72, to the original old cottage. I took a sledgehammer to all the internal, and most of the external, walls and worked, as I have always done, engaging the landscape.'

The Palm House, one of his first commissions after his return to Australia, also had a hand in helping him to settle back into the country. 'I poured myself into the place by way of reconciliation,' he recalls. The client was introduced to Leplastrier through his friend Mary Andrews (ex-wife of designer Gordon Andrews) and all he knew about him was that he had returned from Japan, had worked with Utzon, was a sailor and very much of the earth. Before working with Leplastrier the owner took a look at the house he had designed for the Halford family in Bayview. 'It was an extraordinarily beautiful house – quite a revelation. Japan was everywhere and as I hadn't been to Japan at that stage, it was the closest thing I had seen.'

The owner had bought the land after looking at houses in the area. Finding nothing suitable, the agent mentioned a subdivision being sold by the church. A fibro garage was the only building on it, an insubstantial structure in a quite spectacular grove of ancient palms.

The owner recalls Leplastrier standing in winter, in his greatcoat, at his drawing board discussing the 'tyranny of comfort', as he worked on design details. He was on site for around 18 months as the house evolved. 'Richard was very persuasive. If he felt I wasn't seeing something, he would do a mock-up. To show me a wall height he would put string between the trees and hang a piece of newspaper over it.'

The openness of the space is best viewed from the garden. The canvas can be seen tied up under the steel supports. When the retractable roof is open, the level of natural light increases and the connection to the palms and the experience of indoors and outdoors dissolving into one is, in the words of Leplastrier, 'like a mirage'.

The living/dining area is simply furnished with a daybed at one end and a table by Jeffrey Broadfield at its centre.

Leplastrier's houses tend to be secluded in location, visited only by invitation and rarely publicised, and the Palm House is a case in point. Hidden from the street, 'the heart of this house is the garden, into which the house dissolves at its edges like a mirage', says Leplastrier. It challenges one's conception of what a house is. To many, there is an expectation of four solid walls, a roof – pitched or flat – window openings and a garden accessed via a door. Leplastrier's thinking is radical because he throws out those notions and creates a whole new vocabulary.

With its single rammed earth wall, canvas walls, and gallery roof that resembles, in Leplastrier's own words, 'a pair of upturned rowing sculls', it is staggeringly groundbreaking. It sits, a handcrafted shelter so thoroughly integrated into the site that it has a timeless quality. The only nod to the decade of its creation is a white Joe Colombo table in the garden, bought by the owner in an expansive moment in London before the house was finished.

This corridor, open to the garden on the left, shows the 'service spine' on the right, housing the electricals and plumbing, and hence the kitchen and bathroom.

While the house is not decorative, it does benefit from the fact that all functionality is exquisitely expressed. The rammed earth wall retains the suggestion of the timber planks that formed it; the timber gulleys running the interior length of the house are fashioned in redwood factory offcuts with bands of laminated oregon and are, according to Leplastrier, like 'a musical instrument' and the canvas walls combine with the steel framing to evoke lightness and impermanence.

Leplastrier's drawing of the Palm House scheme.

The entrance to the house recalls Japan. Beautiful irregular stones, as though placed by nature, lead to a sliding door and narrow entrance covered by vines. This space is low and intimate in scale and so the sense of awe, as one steps into the main living area, is enhanced by the contrast.

'I learnt from the Japanese about the structure of landscape and how a good work of architecture brings the landscape into being,' says Leplastrier. And when you enter this first room it is to the garden that you are immediately drawn.

The structure of the house is simple in that the rammed earth wall becomes a 'service spine'. All electrics and plumbing run along it, as do the kitchen and timber-crafted bathroom with sliding privacy screens. The bedroom is on the garden side and, while modest in dimensions, is rendered uplifting with its arched windows infilled with canvas.

The subtle subtext of the house is the balance of the organic and the measured. The proportion of the arch is pure geometry – a square and a half circle – and the regularity and repetition of the terrazzo tiles point to what Leplastrier recalls as 'the original structural system and module that gives an inner order – it goes beautifully with the garden as they counterbalance one another'. For the owner it is the rhythm set by these recurring lines in the construction module – the repetition from the floor planks to the ribs in the roof – that renders it 'too good to be accidental'.

When asked if it garnered praise from the architectural profession or brought potential clients, Leplastrier is philosophical. 'The house wasn't published anywhere, but occasionally possible clients came and fled. A wonderful man called Mr Christmas came to see us on the job when the Palm House was three-quarters finished. I could see the look on his face. We laughed and admitted we couldn't work together – it was the best test.'

The relationship with clients is something that is at the heart of Leplastrier's practice. 'A good house is an outer garment for their lives, and if you don't have a good rapport with those people, and overlapping values by which you live, well, we are wasting each other's time.' The owner of the Palm House has, according to Leplastrier, brought the house into flower, the ultimate compliment from the architect.

While contained and gentle in manner, Leplastrier has little time for those who don't appreciate the things he holds dear. The owner of a house he had designed some years earlier took issue when the architect, requested to consult on an alteration, proposed a simply crafted study space with a slit window looking to the water. The client needed more storage space for his suits. 'Why don't you,' Leplastrier said, in his customary measured tone, 'have half as many suits and have them twice as well made and leave the study as it is?'

The garden evolved through the owner adopting the advice of a friend to look at what already grows and work with large leaves close to the house and smaller leaves further away to give the illusion of space.

The pond was not part of the original plan, but when architect and owner saw how high the house was sitting on the land, the idea of a pond evolved. The deck is a basking place for the many water dragons that have made the garden their home.

The vaulted bedroom showcases the fine timber work and the use of canvas infills produced by Leplastrier's skilled boatbuilder friends.

The question of how to resolve the back wall was slow to come but when it did it was a eureka moment for Leplastrier. His inspiration for pleated canvas came from a rickshaw, and echoes the pattern of the cabbage tree fronds.

Described by the owner as the 'world's best shower', the water pours down from a great height and is often watched by at least two water dragons sitting nearby.

The Japanese style bathtub sits behind a sliding screen and this exquisitely detailed room illustrates how boatbuilding skills have been incorporated into the building.

He is aware this has limited the number of commissions he has accepted over the years (about 30 in 40 years of practice) but when the relationship works, the pleasure he gets from it justifies the process. 'I have just finished a cottage for Philip Searle and Barry Ross, where production drawings were done, with brilliant builder Rolly Clarke, on the back of pieces of plywood. It was a lovely collaboration.'

He also acknowledges there has to be a degree of faith. 'There are times when it is hard to understand why things have to be done a certain way, and the great client will trust the process.' Leplastrier also equates the size of the 'work in progress' file to the success of the job. A thin file is a good file and the Searle/Ross job was a mere centimetre thick.

When asked the size of the file on the Palm House, both architect and owner agree it was a 'no file' job. 'There wasn't much paperwork,' says the owner. 'That would have been a parallel universe.' What is not in doubt is that the house and its 'fit' with its owner is second to none. Leplastrier said in an architectural conference in 1993 that 'things only become truly beautiful with appreciative use'. If this is the case, the Palm House and its true beauty are beyond question. Leplastrier acknowledges that when first inhabited, a house is not at its most beautiful, only becoming so when it has been used, with love. 'This is the one that has shown that resonance over time.'

It is also a house that would have been impossible to create without a client who had the faith. While the owner says he was practical and had no sense that he was commissioning (which sounds too grand for his intentions) what is essentially a work of art, the truth is that without such an exceptional client the house could not have been built to the original design. Leplastrier recalls that he 'never pulled the pin on anything and said many times there should be no compromise. If we ran out of money we just held off for a while.'

Leplastrier's reputation for integrity has had recognition both locally and internationally. He has won Australia's highest architectural award – the RAIA Gold Medal (1999) – and was the 2004 recipient of the International Spirit of Nature Wood Architecture Award, whose previous winners have been Renzo Piano, Kengo Kuma and Peter Zumthor. In late 2009 he won the Dreyer Foundation Prize of Honour for his commitment to sustainability, the first non-Dane to receive the honour.

Writing about the award in _The Australian_ newspaper, Philip Drew pointed out, 'Leplastrier's quietly restrained approach and philosophy is more akin to the ideas of mid-nineteenth century American nature writer Henry David Thoreau who posed the question "How much house is really necessary?"' I think it is a question that is answered by the Palm House.

When asked how he feels sitting in the house 35 years later, Leplastrier says, 'I love to come here. I always have and it gives me the same pleasure now as always. But I doubt I would have the courage to do it now. We were both young and foolish, and we were both driven by beauty. And still are.'

DETAILS THE PALM HOUSE

COPPER ROOF With such a close link to the surrounding vegetation, it was felt that the roof should have a natural appearance that worked tonally with the rest of the house. Corrugated copper was chosen for its original colour and ability to develop patina over time. The semi-cylindrical shape of the roof posed no problems, in theory, as metal, which bends particularly well in large curves, is commonly seen in water tanks. However, the machine used to roll the corrugated iron kept collapsing under the weight of the copper, and to resolve the issue, the machine was unbolted, put on its side, and the copper rolled through.

RAMMED EARTH WALL The rammed earth (pisé) wall runs the entire length of the house and wraps protectively around the garden. The Roman red colour of the earth trucked in from Terrey Hills, 15 km away, varies slightly from the floor to the ceiling with the stratified nature of the rammed earth process. To finish it, the wall was sealed with thinned out PVA glue to stop any crumbling that might occur. The work was supervised by Douglas Little and driven by an unemployed barrister called Red Ted, who was perpetually covered in red earth and nicknamed 'The Van Gogh of Pisé'.

PLATFORM AND POND With Leplastrier there is a sense that each problem brings an opportunity for an inspired solution. When the bedroom pavilion was designed, it sat higher on the land than either architect or client had imagined, and so the landscape was brought up to meet it and a pond created to carry the sense of platform through the site. The sound of the water adds to the aural ambience of the house and provides an early morning wake-up call to the owner as the biggest of the water dragons uses it as a plunge pool at dawn.

GUTTERS Running the length of the house are two parallel semi-circular gutters of corrugated copper clad underneath in clinker boat–style overlapping timbers of redwood factory offcuts and banded with laminated oregon. They draw the eye through the length of the house to the garden beyond. The large gutters together span the width of the hallway, and while functionally removing the rainfall from the curved roof, their aesthetic appeal is undeniable: 'Like a musical instrument', says Leplastrier. The low ceiling of the hallway serves to emphasise the height of the lounge area where the canvas section of the barrel opens, like an eyelid, to reveal the sky.

TABLE DESIGN Jeffrey Broadfield, who has worked as a builder on several Leplastrier projects, was approached to maintain the Palm House because of his extraordinary ability with timber. Broadfield has also made several pieces of furniture for the house, including a delicate black dining table in the main room. Made from ancient Murray River red gum dredged from the river's many billabongs, the 10,000-year-old timber has turned a beautiful shade of black which, when sanded and waxed, provides a soft lustre. A fine marine-grade stainless steel base was designed by Broadfield and shot-blasted to achieve a matt, muted grey appearance.

CRAFTED BATHROOM Leplastrier lived (and still does) at Lovett Bay, a water access only part of Pittwater, and his longstanding passion for boats and sailing meant he had many contacts in boatbuilding. The Palm House's bathroom has a Japanese timber bath and simple built-in structures made from solid timbers. Located behind a sliding screen, it reveals a ship-like compactness and a reverence for timber. When it came to the interior building work, Leplastrier felt that boatbuilders, rather than conventional builders, would be able to understand the building's scale and achieve the exacting timber work and subtle detailing required.
1974–1975, 1980 THE KEMPSEY HOUSE
GLENN MURCUTT

The offset of the two pavilions that comprise the Kempsey House are clearly shown from this south-eastern end of the house. The entry is via the covered verandah with direct access to the timber-lined living room.

'BY MIXING TOGETHER AUSTRALIA'S VERNACULAR STYLE WITH THE CLEAN LINES OF MODERNISM, HE HAS CREATED AN ARCHITECTURE THAT IS BOTH TRUE TO PLACE AND UNEXPECTEDLY RIGOROUS, LIKE A BOW AND ARROW MADE OF TITANIUM.' JIM LEWIS, _THE NEW YORK TIMES_

The large pivoting doors separate the southern living area from the kitchen, dining and casual living space. The seamless treatment of timber floors and lining for walls and ceilings links the spaces.

GLENN MURCUTT WAS ALREADY AN AWARD-winning architect prior to the Kempsey House, but there was something in the nature of the brief and the client, the remoteness of the site, and Murcutt's own life stage that had the effect of propelling his work to a new level. No other architect could have designed the house at that time, as it represents so much that is core to Murcutt's values and vision. He had studied Mies van der Rohe's modernist classic, the Farnsworth House (1950), under the direction of his father. 'I had to read [the article in _Architectural Forum_ ] about five times to get all the answers right, and my father ended up by saying that it may well turn out to be the twentieth century's most incredible house,' says Murcutt.

He also talks of the strong influence exerted by some buildings on a farm his father owned. 'I said to my brother Gary that if we keep the farm, I know exactly how to design a building within the shed. It was about four metres wide and I said we can insert a kitchen and bathroom core, make a bedroom at one end, the living room at the other, it is all orientated the right way,' recalls Murcutt.

While these are two primary influences, they form only part of the story and to understand more clearly the brilliance of the Kempsey House, aka the Marie Short House, it is necessary to know more of Murcutt the man – his childhood, other powerful influences that shaped his life and career, and the resulting strength and clarity of his philosophy.

Murcutt's father, Arthur, must have been a force to be reckoned with. Born in 1899, he left the Sydney slums of Surry Hills at 15 years of age to take up sheep shearing in Bourke. He became a boxer (a southpaw) immediately prior to the First World War, and in 1920 went pioneering through the villages of Watut and Upper Watut River in Papua New Guinea. It was wild territory and, out from Wau, in the Surprise Creek area, cannibalism was still prevalent. Murcutt tells how his father would disarm a Kukuku chief with a punch in the solar plexus and a faceful of pepper. He also describes how his father chummed around Port Moresby with Forties Hollywood legend Errol Flynn in his days before stardom. The boat he financed and Arthur built was sabotaged because of the debts Flynn had run up with locals, who didn't want him to leave until he paid up.

It was to a gold mine in the isolated heart of Papua New Guinea that Arthur Murcutt brought his wife Daphne Powys, 16 years his junior, in 1934. Glenn was born in England, on the couple's way to the Berlin Olympics in 1936, but spent the first six years of his life in PNG.

'We lived in the region known as the Upper Watut on the junction with Surprise Creek, which was the home of the Kukuku people,' says Murcutt. 'Their approach, sighted only by the snake-like movement of the grasses in the landscape, created great fear in the local miners. My father, while fearful also, knew how to handle them.'

His memories of this time are prodigious and long lasting and he acknowledges that 'our survival was related to observation, listening, seeing, smelling, touching'. This ensured his profound connection to nature, and he still appreciates the simple beauty and logical form of the conical huts of the Lower Highlands in New Guinea. Life revolved around swimming in the pool his father constructed by putting a concrete wall across a creek, and searching the kunai grass for the long red tail tied to packages and mail dropped from a Gipsy Moth by way of a postal service.

Local villagers, of whom he was very fond, cared for him, his sister and brother, and when he came back to Australia in 1942, at the age of six, he spoke only Pidgin English. 'A helicopter was, "Impelar Mixmaster bilong im God".It is an amazing language,' says Murcutt.

His father had invested wisely in land and had amassed more than 100 sites in Clontarf, in Sydney's north. The family moved to the seaside suburb of Manly where Murcutt marvelled at the number of cars and white people while remaining terrified of the black-habit-clad nuns from the nearby convent. School was challenging, especially when it came to the written word, and to this day he feels much more able to articulate ideas than write them down.

Post-war, with the proceeds from the gold mine, Arthur Murcutt bought a concrete brick maker and started to design modern houses on sites he owned. In 1949 he opened a joinery factory run by an 'incredible Scottish craftsman called Bill Davidson' to prefabricate elements for his projects. By the time Murcutt was 18 he had laboured on building sites – mixed concrete and poured footings – crafted different sorts of windows and staircases in the joinery factory, and worked up drawings and photographed models of his father's designs to submit to council. If ever there were a practical training for an architect, this was it.

The living room imparts a sense of warmth and honesty through the use of timber-lined walls and ceiling. The furnishings and lighting are Nordic, illustrating Murcutt's life-long love of the work of such designers as Yrjö Kukkapuro, Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen.

Arthur Murcutt also had a strong aesthetic sensibility. He subscribed to a number of American architectural journals such as _Arts and Architecture_ (which launched The Case Study Houses program in 1945) and encouraged his son to read them until he understood the principles they described. 'My father introduced me to Gordon Drake's work in 1948 when I was 12, alongside Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Craig Ellwood and many others. All this was part of my childhood.'

Simplicity and symmetry are the hallmarks of this space. The degree to which the design is completely open-plan was still new at the time. The banks of louvres, manufactured by Pillar Naco, form the northern and southern walls of each pavilion.

The other traits Arthur Murcutt strove to engender in his five children were a musical mindset and mental toughness through sporting achievement. 'We lived in a three storey house with seven pianos. It was like a conservatorium,' says Murcutt. 'The discipline of getting up at six in the morning – a half mile swim, come back for half an hour's piano practice, then walk to school. I wasn't brought up in a traditional suburban family.'

Murcutt had never considered any other career but architecture, 'and while my father gave me all the encouragement, he gave me no financial assistance. He said. "Now that you have got into university, son, pay your own fees and get a job. You work in an office and you do studies in architecture half time. Furthermore, don't go for the money, go for the experience."

He gave me some names – Peter Muller, Harry Seidler, Neville Gruzman and Bill Lucas. Neville took me on for nineteen and sixpence per week.' Not only did he assist Gruzman on a number of houses, including the Goodman House in Sydney's Middle Cove and the Benjamin House in Longueville, but he was also exposed to the thinking of Bill and Ruth Lucas, who shared the office space, and whose Glass House (1957) in Castlecrag remains one of the groundbreaking designs of the era. 'Neville was as tough as nails,' says Murcutt, 'but he would take our university work and critique it, and he was a marvellous teacher for me.' Another architect he acknowledges as influential was Russell Jack.

'Russell taught me to detail and to draw and he had a very powerful affinity with, and respect for, the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. It was also the first generation to become interested in the Australian landscape and building.'

A three-year period in Europe followed an annual pattern of eight months of work and four months travel. The time spent in the Greek Islands, Venice and the former Yugoslavia were all important to him, but the country that was critical to his architectural development was Finland, through the work of Alvar Aalto. 'The use of concrete and timber, the white walls and the screening systems"it was a real turning point for me.'

Returning to Australia in the mid-Sixties, he secured a job with one of Sydney's most prestigious practices, Ancher, Mortlock, Murray & Woolley, but by 1969 Murcutt was ready to set up on his own. 'I was getting to a stage where I was starting to rock the boat and realised I had to see whether I could survive on my own. My father gave me this piece of advice: "Now that you are entering practice, you must remember to start off the way you would like to finish. And remember that for every compromise you knowingly make in your work, the result represents the quality of your next client."That is something I have lived by.'

Raised slightly, but low enough to sit framed by the surrounding trees, the house recalls the Australian vernacular but one imbued with a principled, modernist aesthetic.

He launched his practice in a recession and, despite Bill Lucas's advice never to work for immediate family, he took on the job of designing a house for his brother Douglas and wife Ruth, and his other brother Gary did the lion's share of the building work. He had one other job, for his accountant, which became a lesson in the necessity of always purchasing quality products. The budget was radically reduced mid-project and in an attempt to save money, Murcutt specified fittings he lived to regret. 'It taught me to save on the size of a building, never to save on products,' he says.

The verandah facing west and north is the ultimate outdoor room, enclosed on two sides by mesh, keeping the insects at bay.

In 1969 he also undertook a bold renovation of his own house in Wunda Road, Mosman, grafting a skilful homage to Mies van der Rohe onto the back of a traditional semi. Internal walls dissolved to form open living spaces, and the simple floating platform extended the structure into the garden. Importantly, in 1972, it won an award. The RAIA Gray & Mulroney Award for alterations to existing buildings came with the prize of a round-the-world plane ticket. He used the opportunity, first, to travel to Los Angeles to meet an architect he had long admired – one of the self-proclaimed 'three blind Mies', Craig Ellwood. 'He was very generous and gave me access to the Daphne House and to a lot of other buildings,' says Murcutt. 'But when I broached the subject of climate control inside his buildings he looked at me as though it was the silliest question he had ever been asked.' When Ellwood told him that they were air-conditioned, it was another turning point in his career. 'I recognised several things – no overhangs mean potential for leaking windows, you get good winter sun but unwanted summer sun, and no window openings, no eaves overhang and a flat roof, poorly insulated, means you can't have that sort of building in my country.'

On the same trip, Murcutt also visited the highly influential Maison de Verre (1931) in Paris, by Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet. 'I was given absolute access to the house for hours and hours. I was struck by the skill of the metal fabricator, Dalbet, because he was the one who designed many of the components to work in the way that the architects wanted them to.'

It was this marriage of standardisation with craftsmanship that Murcutt was exploring in his own work that caused the Maison de Verre to resonate so strongly with him. In addition, the house made use of active façades in a series of quite large hopper and louvred panels, one set at the end of the living room and the other within the kitchen area.

The Laurie Short House (1972–73) directly preceded the Marie Short House and while it is Miesian in its metal-framed, rectangular structure, the two houses do have strong elements in common. 'When you look at Laurie's house, it's got two wings and a corridor down the middle. In Marie Short's, one wing extends beyond the other to produce a verandah in the corner,' says Murcutt. 'This was an articulation that went further in Marie's house.' In the Laurie Short House, he also introduced metal venetian blinds and a horizontal _brise soleil_ to modify heat and light levels, and this sense of responsiveness to climate was to find fuller expression in his next project.

Marie Short, Laurie's mother, had bought some land in Kempsey (now known as Crescent Head), in rural New South Wales, then a seven-hour drive from Sydney. She had originally approached Bill Lucas to undertake some additions and alterations to an existing 1890s two-bedroom farmhouse, but time had dragged on, and when she saw her son's house, she approached Murcutt. Initially Murcutt responded to the brief for alterations but when they received the construction estimate from builder Bill Brenton, Murcutt said to Marie, 'In spending so much money on the old house, why not build a new house?'

Her brief to Murcutt was as poetic as any architect could wish for. 'She wanted it to be as cool as standing under a mulberry tree in summer and, as the tree loses leaves, as wonderfully warm in winter with the sun coming in. Marie really was a critical client in my development – she spoke thoughtfully and was incredibly perceptive,' Murcutt says.

The correct siting of the house was immediately evident to Murcutt. 'It was very clear that you are connecting two bodies of water. One was the lake, which is fed by three springs, and the other was the bend in the Maria River, and you can capitalise on both views.' The landscape always informs us, Murcutt often says.

The other mandatory part of the brief (which never eventuated) was the potential to dismantle the house and move it to another site on her land. 'I designed it so that it bolted together and you could take it apart in two wings, put it on a truck and appropriately resite it,' says Murcutt.

Given the distance from Sydney, Murcutt was aware that site visits could only be every three weeks, and because he would rely on local labour, he realised that by keeping structure and detailing simple, he would gain the best from his long-range workforce. Marie Short had been collecting excellent quality Australian hardwoods and other timbers from a local sawmill, and with this combination of factors, the design came to Murcutt with great speed. 'I left the site on a Sunday and came back the following Friday with the drawings half-done because I knew the available materials and the brief.'

The house consists of two long, low, offset pavilions. In the original plan (Murcutt bought the house in 1980 and has skilfully modified the 1974 floor plan), the axis of living/dining area faces the river to the west, with its orientation north; two bedrooms and a winter sitting room form the southern wing. Each pavilion has a wide verandah at either end. The site of the house is well above flood level – about 6 metres – on raised land above the river and it is built on stilts another 800 mm above ground level to ensure heavy summer rains do not splash into windows that need to be open for ventilation, and the many snakes and goannas that seek higher ground in heavy rains do not easily come into the house. The two pavilions are joined by a wide central gutter, originally the only guttering, but with the later addition of rain tanks at the end of each pavilion, edge gutters were added.

As well as being moveable and extendable, the house also had to be adjustable to the changing climatic conditions. Murcutt did this in several ways. He used flyscreening extensively to keep insects and rodents out but to allow maximum ventilation and a sense of openness – especially on the verandah adjoining the northern orientated living area. It becomes an extension of the living space both visually and practically, and the low-penetrating winter sun enables it to be used all year round.

The plan of the house in 1975 and 1980.

The large pivoting door from the north-western verandah to the bathroom and bedrooms appears part of the wall when closed.

Murcutt failed the 'sun and shade' course at the University of New South Wales, and, as someone who knows the positive driver failure can be, made sure he understood it absolutely. The Kempsey House is a finely calibrated example of how climate is managed – how the house responds to the sun as the day and the seasons pass; how cool breezes from the north-east are welcomed in summer and how the impact of cold winds from the west are minimised in winter. Metal sun screens over glazed louvres, of Murcutt's own design, line the northern roofing of the living/dining area and the winter sitting room and regulate the sun entry seasonally. Glass louvres are used on the southern side and venetian blinds in aluminium and timber allow further control.

The master bedroom, part of the 1980 addition, is in keeping with the original. Again, simplicity and warmth are key.

The roof emphasises the connection to the Australian vernacular and plays into the skill set of local builders. Everything he specified was available onsite or could be readily sourced locally or from catalogues.

The house's simple, local hardwood post-and-beam design, the modular frame and the interior lining of native hoop pine boards ensured the quality could be delivered and the building's integrity maintained. The overall effect is Nordic, enhanced by Murcutt's longstanding appreciation of the furniture and design of Alvar Aalto and Yrjö Kukkapuro, and the lights of Arne Jacobsen and Poul Henningsen 'Every architectural student should have, as an integral part of their education, the whole history of furniture, of light and lighting,' says Murcutt.

Talking about Aalto, Murcutt says: 'I saw longevity in his ideas. It was about light, prospect, refuge and space. He understood materials, the relation of materials to spaces.' He could be talking about himself. In 1992 Murcutt was awarded the Alvar Aalto medal from Finland and, in 2002, the Pritzker Prize for architecture. The jury noted that he was an exception in a world of 'celebrity starchitects'. Indeed, Murcutt has had the self-possession to take his own path and, in the words of Thoreau, has undertaken to 'do ordinary things extraordinary well'. It is nothing short of what his father, Arthur, would have expected.

Exterior view of master bedroom. The offset of the pavilions is clear, as is the perfectly calibrated relationship of the water tanks to the house.

DETAILS THE KEMPSEY HOUSE

MATERIALS 'I see simplicity not so much as a disregard for complexity but as a clarification of the significant,' says Glenn Murcutt. In this sense, the materials he favours are both simple and significant. His client Marie Short had acquired a fine collection of Australian hardwoods for construction, and the use of corrugated iron reflects the Australian vernacular tradition he admired. The water tanks were a subsequent addition: set in finely calibrated pairs diagonally opposite one another at either end of the building, maintaining its symmetry and exemplifying Murcutt's ability to perfectly marry the functional and the poetic.

INTERIOR Murcutt's appreciation for Alvar Aalto – both his furniture and his use of timber – can be seen in the living space. The furnishings include the Yrjö Kukkapuro designed Ateljee sofas and armchairs from 1963, Aalto's 406 laminated birch and woven linen armchairs from 1938, along with his later 'fan-leg' tables and stools from 1954. For the fireplace, Murcutt has customised an existing Jetmaster 850 wood-burning space heater by designing a 6 mm steel plate housing to contain the fire box and create two open areas, on either side, visually simplifying the storage of logs and kindling. These extended 'wings' also have the practical effect of acting as a heat sink, radiating additional heat into the room.

VERANDAH  The house has two wings, distinctly separated by a large central gutter. Each wing slips to form a verandah at one end. The axis of the day living/dining/kitchen verandah spaces, shown, is orientated west, towards the bend in the Maria River where the water takes on the colours of the setting sun. On the other wing, the verandah is orientated east towards the large lake, in turn catching the morning sun. Although the site is 6 m above flood level, the house is set an average 800 mm above the finished ground level for better cross ventilation from the prevailing onshore breezes and to avoid splashes from heavy summer rains and the entry of frogs, reptiles and insects.

BOLTS The honesty of the house and its construction method are evident in the way the bolts that connect the timber elements are made obvious. One of Marie Short's requests was that the house be built in such a way as to be able to be transported to an adjacent site on her land in the future. Murcutt determined the house had to be in two wings for removal. When he bought the house in 1980, he was able to extend the house in the same profiles, providing two major new sections — a master bedroom, laundry and extra storage space and a large winter living room. Because of the method of construction assembly, every major component affected by the alterations was reused in their new locations.

LOUVRES Murcutt was brought up to understand the importance of ventilation, light, orientation and climate, and so while he admits failing 'Sun and Shade' one year at university, that failure was critical in driving his understanding and his ultimate mastery of the subject. He used his interest in aerodynamics and his passion for sailing and flight to develop principles for the movement of air over surfaces. This house makes use of louvres, set between load-bearing posts and floor beams; sheets of mesh, which allow ventilation but keep the insects out; and external venetian blinds in aluminium, to control sun penetration and air flow.

CHAIRS  The Pressu, a lightweight armchair following the Bauhaus aesthetic, was designed by Yrjö Kukkapuro and imported from Finland by Murcutt. The chromed tubular steel frame has a two-piece sling of linen fabric that softens its Bauhaus leanings into something more casual and appropriate for use in the Kempsey House. An enthusiast of Kukkapuro's work, Murcutt appreciated his practical application of functionalism, and used many of the Finnish designer's pieces (such as his Ateljee sofas and armchairs, which he also imported) in his domestic designs over the years. Kukkapuro designed the Pressu for Finnish company Haimi in 1972 and has been the principal designer for Avarte since it started in 1980, reissuing many of the earlier Haimi designs there.
1983–1990 THE PHILLIP ISLAND HOUSE
BARRIE MARSHALL

Marshall's intention was that the house would barely register its presence and read merely as 'a single plane on the oceanfront'.

Industrial materials – concrete and galvanised steel – give the house its raw, uncompromising character and justify its nickname, the bunker.

'THE HOUSE IN NO WAY CONNOTES RESIDENCE OR DOMESTICITY. IN ITS CONTEXT IT LURKS LIKE A STEALTH BOMBER, HIDDEN AND SUBVERSIVE.'

HAIG BECK AND JACKIE COOPER

The narrow entrance to the compound feels monumental, creates a sense of anticipation and is in sharp contrast to the open space beyond.

AS AN ARCHITECT BARRIE MARSHALL HAS an unerring ability to create a sense of anticipation. The huge, sinuous sculptural forms in canary yellow, and the seemingly precariously tilting columns in fire-engine red that line the freeway into Melbourne say something significant about how the city sees itself; it is about art and sculpture, it is about being daring, and demanding that you think differently. Denton Corker Marshall is the firm of architects behind this commission and Barrie Marshall, one of the founding partners, sees the entrance to Melbourne project as 'one of the best things we have ever done. It worked because we are interested in urban stuff, big sculptural forms and movement.'

On a different road and a different journey the sense of anticipation is no less intense. I had seen photographs of the Phillip Island House, two hours drive south of Melbourne, in a 1997 issue of _Architecture Australia_ and with only a fax of hand-drawn directions and a landline number (Barrie never answers his mobile, his assistant told me) I set off to see the house the locals call 'the bunker'.

Phillip Island is most famous for its motor racing and is a popular holiday spot for Melburnians wanting a weekender – something fibro in the Fifties but more substantial and suburban these days. The Phillip Island House is located at Kitty Miller Bay on the south of the island where houses become less frequent and give way to low-lying, scrubby native grasses and windswept open farmland. Without the map, and the benefit of daylight, the house would have remained hidden, its grass roof blending into the surrounding landscape. The entrance is through a narrow gap in a fortress-like concrete wall, opening, dramatically and unexpectedly, to an enormous enclosed courtyard sheltered from the prevailing winds.

Barrie Marshall was not born to architecture and, indeed, readily admits it meant nothing to him until a maths teacher at high school suggested he consider it as a career. 'I was brought up in Clayton, in a working class Australian family where none of the kids had been to university,' he says. 'I had never been inside an architect-designed house or even really knew what an architect was.' He applied for both architecture at Melbourne University and engineering at Monash, and chose the former. 'Just as well, as I would have made a terrible engineer,' he says.

'It was a big intake that year, maybe 130 students, and they all seemed to come from private schools and know about architecture: name-dropping Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. I was just 17 years old so it was quite disconcerting for me as I wasn't from that background. Fortunately I was good at drawing and that made it easy for me to be accepted.'

Both his future partners, John Denton and Bill Corker, were in the same year – John in his immediate set of friends and Bill in another group. It was Barrie and John, along with some fellow students, who, in their third year of study, set off to Europe on the last journey of the migrant boat _Flavia_ in 1966, to Italy. They ended up in London, living in Earls Court, and working in various practices to gain broader experience. Six months later they were on the road in a Kombi van, with 'Melbourne University School of Architecture' emblazoned on the side, taking a tour of significant buildings around Europe and the Middle East. 'John [Denton] and John Peck knew what they were looking for – I just went along for the ride,' says Marshall.

The entrance to the house is made from galvanised steel with a giant three-metre-high sliver of a wall leading to a galvanised portico and door. The house is narrow (5.4 m) and so the view of the ocean is clear from the entrance. The blade wall masks a washing line, which is fixed to the side facing into the courtyard.

Modular stainless steel benches, designed by Marshall, sit between the sunroom on the left and the wall of windows to the ocean on the right. The rigorously monochromatic interior of concrete, terrazzo and stainless steel allow the views to be the hero.

Post university, he worked for Eggleston MacDonald & Secombe in their Melbourne office and subsequently for himself doing perspectives for a couple of years. In 1971 he and his wife, Raine, returned to London, where he worked for Powell & Moya until one day, towards the end of 1972, a phone call came from John Denton saying that he and Bill were setting up a practice with Graeme Shaw and would he come back to Australia and join them.

'When we started we didn't have a great deal of work,' says Marshall. 'We had a landscaping partner, Andras Kelly, and John and Bill were both planners, and that kept us going, but we didn't do any building work of note except for a sea pilot station on Western Port Bay which wasn't bad.'

Gradually their fortunes changed. DCM won the competition to do the City Square, which was a mixed blessing (it was later demolished), but helped raise their profile, and they were shortlisted in the competition for the Australian Parliament. Another opportunity came their way when establishment architects Yuncken Freeman were dismantling their practice and one director, Robert Peck, was given the Hong Kong office. 'He was a young business-y sort of guy who wasn't a designer and never pretended to be,' says Marshall. 'He had approached several architects to partner him without success, but when he came to us it seemed like a good opportunity to expand. I spent three months in Hong Kong to get the design side restarted.'

They became PDCM, and Robert Peck's connections got them into the competition for a significant office block, No 1 Collins Street, Melbourne, which they won. Next came the project that catapulted them into a whole new league.

The Australian Embassy in Beijing 'had all the big guns going for it – Seidler and John Andrews – and I think we got it partly because Richard Johnson, [principal architect with the Department of Housing & Construction], liked our rigid, austere design and knew that he could be involved and work with us, in a way that would not have been possible with the others.'

Marshall is aware that they were nobodies on the Australian architectural scene at the time and they hadn't earned their stripes either commercially or in the academic world.

'There was a sense of "who are these guys and what have they done?" and I can see from their point of view we would have been these bloody upstarts,' says Marshall. But these 'bloody upstarts' were on a roll with the commission for the Australian Embassy in Tokyo followed by another prestigious Melbourne office block, 101 Collins Street, in 1981.

While professional life continued apace, Marshall's private time was spent at Phillip Island. He had been going to Kitty Miller Bay spearfishing and skindiving since his childhood and indeed it was on Phillip Island that the 16-year-old Marshall met his future wife, Raine.

'She was camping with her family at San Remo – we were more upmarket in a fibro shack – and we met through friends of friends,' says Marshall. 'Fifteen years later we bought a block of land at Silverleaves and I built a tiny, two-storey, timber cube with the help of my brother-in-law. But over the years we could see Silverleaves becoming more suburban and when this block on Kitty Miller Bay came up we bought it.'

The four-hectare site sits between two headlands facing the ocean, and has the advantage of being the only area on Phillip Island's southern side that is protected from the direct sea swell. Having bought the land, an even more desirable block came up for sale on the headland. 'We put a deposit down on it and left for a six-week trip, leaving arrangements in the hands of the lawyers. We also put this land back on the market,' says Marshall.

While they were away the whole deal fell through and his plans for a cave-like dwelling buried into the headland had to be put aside. 'It was probably just as well as it would have ended up even more expensive than this place.' Luckily no one had bought the Kitty Miller Bay site.

The Vico Magistretti Sinbad sofa provides a bolt of bright colour and is placed to face the ever-changing seascape.

The single-storey building is designed to sit low on the site and hug the ground, and the plan was always that it would weather over the years to become part of the landscape.

Chiaroscuro lighting creates mood as furniture disappears or becomes sharply lit by shards of intense light. The Sinbad chair sits behind a prototype for a coffee table designed by Marshall for the Adelphi Hotel.

'Penguin' windows in the north facing wall throw varying light patterns according to the sun's angle.

In terms of design Marshall was clear what he did not want. 'I decided that, no matter what, the wrong thing to do was to make the house an object, that no matter how fine, how elegant, how cleverly executed – a butterfly perched on the crest of the dunes – it would have been the wrong thing to do.'

So in a plan that would have made Frank Lloyd Wright proud (his architectural philosophy was that building and site should work as one), Marshall set out to make his house as much a part of the landscape as possible. 'I didn't want to hide it, just to make it fit,' he says.

And it is around this idea of 'fit' and connection with nature that Marshall's concept grew. The dark concrete he chose links with the black granite rocks on the beach, the single-storey, low-lying building reads like a 'cliff in the landscape', and the grassed roof blends it seamlessly into the surrounds. The house is barely there.

This sense of integration into its site is furthered by the structure – a trapezium from the southern elevation. The house hugs the dunes on the western end so that the manmade structure blends into the natural one. 'From the ocean side I hoped it would read as an abstract composition: not an intrusion but a natural sculpture,' says Marshall.

Initially Marshall's design was larger, with a colonnaded façade, and there was a plan for a concrete shell with a timber lining. When the quote came through in the region of $600,000–700,000 he revised the scale and the interior scheme, and just made a start. His priorities were always to have sun in as many rooms as possible and to exploit the views.

'I shifted to a simpler statement: a wall with punched openings,' he says. 'I started thinking of views from the inside. The views through the openings would become the very essence of the building.'

He also did something he could not do professionally – he allowed the interior demands to dictate the positioning of the window openings, with little regard to their external appearance. Each room has a placement according to its needs – full-length in the living space, sill-height when sitting in bed in the master bedroom, just above eye-level in the bathroom, and to floor-level up against the sunken bath. By abandoning his initial plan for a double skin, concrete became the material used outside and in, creating a dark frame that distils and concentrates the emphasis on the rugged view.

Marshall had worked through his desire to build in timber in the house in Silverleaves and, having seen the effectiveness of concrete in some of his commercial projects, it became his material of choice. Fortunately, through luck rather than design, Phillip Island has a concrete works. But instead of using Portland Grey concrete, which weathers to a dirty brown, Marshall opted for a black (dark grey) concrete that would achieve the more natural 'blotchy' effect he was after.

The other interior materials were no less compromising than the concrete: black terrazzo flooring, galvanised steel panels, aluminium, zinc and glass. Yet Marshall insists, 'I didn't choose these materials to be provocative, they arose out of practicality and also perhaps out of a sort of naivety. It was a holiday house and I didn't see why not.'

The resulting use of this palette of materials is, as described by George Michell in _Architecture Australia_ , 'ruthless elegance' and, as its dark tones combine with the manipulation of light, it becomes an immensely photogenic house.

The design was now resolved to be 'one long, singular volume', with rooms that were a 'series of subdivisions'. Large pivoting doors helped define the space and so the house could be opened up, or closed down as required. Marshall wanted the interior to be unrestricted by beams and so the 5.4 metre span became the achievable working width for the concrete wall-to-wall slabs.

A builder, Rob Needham, and his family were housed nearby and for about a year he worked to get the building to a basic shell. 'At this stage there was no courtyard,' says Marshall. 'I worked on the insides for about a year and then we got a caravan and I worked for three or four months but it took another two or three years to get it to where it is now.'

Marshall not only designed and built the interior fittings but designed individual pieces of furniture and fixtures. The double bed, in the master bedroom, with its myriad legs is now gently mocked by its creator as being incredibly impractical (impossible to get a brush to sweep under), and his stainless steel cubes for washing, set in the centre of the bathroom he now sees as an 'exercise in making a lot of space less'. Yet, whatever his concerns, it does the job he set out to do with sunlight and views dominating.

The last piece of the design to be finalised was the courtyard. 'The site was a big bare open field and I had this idea that I could make this little world that looked out to the sea and in time I could turn it into anything at all – a rose garden or a vegetable garden,' says Marshall. The dimensions of the courtyard are directly related to the house – 33 metres square, and the wall height is 3.6 metres above ground level. This is determined by the height of the ceilings (2.7 metres) and the 700 mm that was added for the slab and the earth and grass cover. In the east wall, there is one external opening, which is three metres wide for access, and a roomy garage in the west wall, 'for all that crap you collect – mowers, trailers, wheelbarrows, timber, firewood, sailboards, boat, car etc', says Marshall.

The relationship of the house at the courtyard side is different from the ocean side. This northern wall attracts afternoon sun and the slim (300 mm) windows in the corridor (or 'penguin windows' as John Denton called them) create a play of light on the corridor floor that, according to Marshall, 'allows visual contact into the courtyard without long views into it'.

The sunroom is the only intrusion into the courtyard space and it takes on a different character from the rest of the house. It is a mix of aluminium sheeting for the floor and ceiling, and glass panels both fixed and opening on the three sides of the structure. While sun might drift in and out of the other rooms of the house, here it is an all day long affair.

This house is entirely personal. Never entered for awards because Marshall felt it was not quite finished, it is a combination of a medieval walled world and spare modernist edifice linked to nature and embracing the visual spectacle of its surrounds. From the ocean it registers as an abstracted black line, from the land it disappears into the scrubby landscape, and from the sky, on Google Earth, it is hard to spot. In knowing what he didn't want, Marshall created something, in his own words, 'quiet and elemental with no architectural form on the outside'.

The sill height in the bedroom is calibrated to match the eye line when sitting up in bed so that the view can be enjoyed. The bed with its dramatic steel bedhead was designed by Marshall, although he now criticises it for its impractical 'sea of legs'. The raw, unadorned walls and minimal lighting emphasise the 'ruthless elegance'.

The morning light causes the white powder-coated panels in the bathroom to glow.

Marshall's intention was that the views through the openings would become the very essence of the building and hence the placement of the windows was decided to benefit the internal functions rather than concern for how they presented externally.

DETAILS THE PHILLIP ISLAND HOUSE

SUNROOM The only room to disrupt the strict linear plan of the house is a glass box devised as a sun trap. In stark contrast to the otherwise formidable concrete wall, this glass box is lightweight with galvanised steel posts supporting the roof. A link between openness and enclosure, the sunroom allows plenty of northern light to filter into other parts of the house: the late afternoon sun penetrates through to the far side of the kitchen, also filling the adjoining dining room with soft reflected light. The nest of tables is one of Marshall's designs, in metal, with each one fitting exactly into the next like an armadillo's shell.

GALVANISED METAL Used on all the doors, and most of the internal walls, galvanised steel, like concrete, is an industrial material that Marshall subverts for use in a domestic context. Its softly evolving crystalline nature is quite startlingly beautiful – like salt crystals or ice patterns. The prefabricated panels were clipped onto internal stud walls or over solid timber core doors. As the window and door frames are also galvanised, the transition from openings to walls is seamless. The material is, of course, highly durable with a likely lifespan of around 30 years externally and much longer internally.

PENGUIN WINDOWS  Called 'penguin' windows by his business partner John Denton because of their stubby, low profile (300 mm-wide slots set at ground level), these windows create sharp slashes of light along the entire length of the corridor leading to the bedrooms and bathrooms. They allow visual contact with the courtyard while discouraging long views into it. This controlled use of lighting is evident throughout the house. Every room is allowed to be dark and subdued at times, but pierced by dramatic shafts of light at others according to their distinct morning or afternoon characters.

BATHROOM BASIN AND FITTINGS As in the kitchen, freestanding units of stainless steel are used in the bathrooms as a pure geometric form. Combined with the white powder-coated aluminium walls, they take on an almost monastic quality. The high metal block, complete with integrated formed sink, also acts as a partition to conceal the toilet. This allows it to be placed in the middle of the room with amazing views directly out the large window (privacy screens can be used when necessary). In the master bathroom, the bath is sunken into the floor, with a stainless steel perforated trapdoor (with two holes to get a fingergrip) covering it, which acts as an extension of the floor.

HOUSE AS LANDSCAPE One of the most appealing aspects of the house is how it hugs the shoreline – virtually disappearing into the sand dune to the west. The angle of the eastern wall of the house carries this idea further so that there is no abrupt vertical end to the manmade element; instead, the house gradually melts back into the ground. With the passing of years the hardy local grasses have self-seeded over the entire roof and walled areas, and the house now feels totally integrated into its site, as Marshall always intended. 'I wanted it to be part of the landscape,' he says. 'I didn't necessarily want to hide it – just make it fit.'

CONCRETE  As the house is predominantly exposed concrete, Marshall was very particular about its appearance – requiring a dark charcoal tone and a natural 'blotchy' effect. A concrete works, a few kilometres away, delivered material in small loads to suit the progress of the builder. The formwork holes were initially intended to be inlaid with stone the colour of local lichen, inspired by the rocks in the bay below. Marshall had mapped out a rational plan in which walls would have orange or green stone inlays, but never completed the scheme – something which he now admits was probably a good thing as the wall has remained simpler and far less attention seeking.
1984–1985 THE PIE HOUSE
GEOFFREY PIE

The façade of the Pie House from the street reveals the progressive sense of entry. From this point you can take in the wide courtyard, the living space and through to the bush and ocean beyond. The pale blue hoppers aid ventilation.

'THE HOUSE AT PEREGIAN BEACH, QUEENSLAND, IS A PLACE FOR RELAXATION. IT MAKES NO DEMANDS BUT HAS A "LAID BACK"ATMOSPHERE INVITING THE VISITOR TO CAST AWAY CARES AND INDULGE IN A LAZY STAY.' NEVILLE QUARRY FROM THE JURY REPORT FOR THE 1986 RAIA ROBIN BOYD AWARD

The south-eastern end of the façade shows Pie's use of the lozenge-shaped window set in the weathered timber boards. The bathroom, with generous glazing, is tucked behind the brush fence.

IN 2007 GEOFFREY PIE (IN CONJUNCTION WITH Hall Phillips & Wilson) received the RAIA Queensland 25 Year Award for Enduring Architecture for his 1978 TAB (now UniTAB) multi-storey commercial building in Albion, Brisbane. The concrete and glass structure, sited on the top of a hill, with generous overhangs and bush hammered concrete on the stair and lift towers, remains a Queensland modernist classic. The jury noted that it was not only a 'forward scout for modern urban architecture' but that it 'has weathered generations of reaction to, and subsequent re-embracing of, the principles of functional modernism'.

The idea that aesthetics emerge from function is one of Pie's core beliefs and is expressed clearly in another award-winning building, albeit very different in scale and material: the timber holiday house he built for his family in 1985 at Peregian Beach. It too, now in its 25th year, has endured and, although no longer owned by the Pie family, remains unaltered and well maintained by the present owners. The spirit of ease, the sense that it 'makes no demands', is no accident. When Geoffrey Pie talks of the powerful influences of his childhood, his experience of holidays and holiday houses, it becomes clear that it could not have turned out any other way.

Geoffrey Pie grew up in a wealthy Queensland family. He was the fifth born of seven – six boys and one girl, or 'six pies and one tart', as the headmaster of Toowoomba Prep boarding school liked to say. His awareness of architecture stemmed from his early exposure to the work of Mervyn Rylance, an eminent residential architect who designed homes for the Pie family both in the city and at the beach at Surfers Paradise.

'His houses had red tiled roofs and overlapping white painted boards,' says Pie. 'He created lovely, generous spaces and, more to the point, he knew where north was. Ours was the last house built in Brisbane before the wartime building restrictions set in, and I remember Dad smuggling Rylance petrol so that he could get to the house inspections.'

His father, Bruce Pie, was a significant figure in Brisbane commercial and political circles: a textile factory owner, employing 1200 people at the company's peak; the Queensland distributor for Kiwi Boot Polish Co. (his brother-in-law John Ramsay's Victorian-based business); and the founder, and Leader of the House, of the Liberal Party in Queensland. A trip to post-war Germany, and his exposure to the Nazi concentration camps, resulted in a book, _Journey into Desolation_. His mother, a 'formidable dame' by all accounts, had trained as a commercial artist prior to raising seven children with a span of 20 years between the oldest and the youngest.

When Pie talks of his childhood he conjures up a picture of carefree camaraderie – a sort of antipodean version of Evelyn Waugh's halcyon depiction of England in the Thirties. Pie boarded at The Southport School, which suited him well because of its convivial atmosphere, his love of sport and the friendship of the 'bushies' – children from rural families. But come the summer his parents would 'pour all their time into us' for extended holidays at the beach house.

Pie describes the journey to the coast as akin to a military operation. The largest of the trucks from the factory was seconded and loaded with everything from fridges to chickens, and the children, extended family and friends all made the trip for the summer season. It was a time of Boxing Day cricket on the beach with a canvas wicket, sand on floorboards (and in the beds), catching worms to sell as bait and New Year's Eve parties that became a significant part of the social calendar.

When he was four, he and his siblings were billeted south to stay with their aunt and uncle, Edith and John Ramsay. 'We were sent to Melbourne because of The Brisbane Line,' says Pie, referring to the alleged proposal by Prime Minister Menzies to concede the area north of Brisbane to the Japanese in the event of an invasion. In Melbourne there was a link to architecture in another fashion; some years earlier Lady Betty Ramsay had caused a scandal by leaving Sir Thomas (John's brother) for Roy Grounds, an architect who had been engaged to remodel the nursery for her new baby. 'Tom was one of dad's directors and we saw lots of him and grew up with the story,' says Pie.

A protected courtyard, the original 'outdoor room', sits under the shade of the sailcloth and is the linking platform between the sleeping pavilion at the street side and the living/dining pavilion on the beach side. The extensive glazing ensures transparency from outdoor to indoor spaces.

The bedrooms are elevated above the ground floor bathroom. The row of windows opens to the view and facilitates Pie's much sought after airflow solution.

Geoffrey Pie was aware from the age of five that architecture was the profession for him. 'With the help of my mother I drew a plan of my first house and stitched it as a piece of tapestry.' A place at Central Technical College with a Commonwealth Scholarship, followed by three years at the University of Queensland, was a time of practical application with inspiration 'thin on the ground'. He does single out both Robin Gibson, who was his master and a significant force in Queensland architecture, from whom he learnt the importance of meticulous detailing, and the Viennese professor, Karl Langer, who taught landscape architecture and town planning. 'Working full time for six years and attending lectures at night was a tough call,' says Pie.

Working on solo design projects was never very far away. In 1960, while still a fourth year student, he designed a rigorously modernist house for his brother Denis in the Brisbane suburb of Samford and, more adventurously, at the behest of the Anglican Bishop of Carpentaria, John Matthews Snr, who had been his school chaplain, he travelled around Cape York and the Torres Strait fixing up churches and designing simple buildings. His interest in Aboriginal affairs has never waned and he has just completed four safe houses for the Queensland Department of Child Safety. Pie acknowledges how good they were to work with. 'I was even allowed bigger sites to face the whole buildings north and use deep overhangs which not only save you from the sun but act as a wind scoop,' he says.

His post-university grand tour – with a mixed bag of co-travellers – took in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Burma, and a Kombi van, shipped from Germany, collected them in Calcutta. It took seven months to get from Brisbane to London and, by the time they arrived, they were all ready to work.

The plans clearly show the two building areas and the way in which the site maximises outdoor space.

Pie was lucky enough to be taken on by Gollins Melvin Ward & Partners and work on an award-winning development in the City of London. Commercial Union Tower and the P&O Building were designed simultaneously, and mutually benefited from an exchange of land, allowing a holistic approach to the site. Exposure to the innovative construction techniques and Miesian detailing would have resonated with Pie's natural instincts and provided sound experience for his own designs for multi-storey buildings.

He had been in London for a period of two years when his mother bought a block of land on the seafront at Surfers Paradise. 'Robin [Gibson] is coming over to start the design,' she told him. '"Like hell he is,"I thought, and I still have the piece of plywood on which I designed the house while still in London,' says Pie. 'I have no doubt it was mother's way of getting me to come home.'

The resulting house (1964–65) was a glass, steel and concrete structure, in homage to Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion. 'It was one of my most powerful houses, incorporating all of my Gibson, Mies and Rylance spirit,' says Pie. A set of photographs, taken at the time by Gabriel Poole, shows a modernist masterpiece sitting low on the land right on the beach. With its internal courtyard (in the sun but out of the wind) and play of openness and enclosure, it foreshadows some of the themes in the Pie House over 20 years later. It also won an award, runner up (to Gibson's Mocatta House) in the 1966 Queensland House Awards, but fell victim to the development of Surfers Paradise and was demolished in the late Seventies. It did, however, serve to put Pie back on the map in his home state.

The bedroom is painted a strong yellow inspired by the local banksia flowers. The combination of the open hopper windows and the lattice shows how breezes are captured and the house remains cool in the subtropical climate. The bookshelf running the length of the bedroom corridor speaks of relaxation and holiday reading.

But he was not to remain a hard-core modernist. For 12 years from the late 1960s, Pie represented the RAIA (Royal Australian Institute of Architects) on the National Trust 'and that softened my approach up a bit as I developed an appreciation for other ways of looking at things', he says. He also chose to live in Brisbane's New Farm in a house built in the 1880s. It was derelict when Pie moved in, and he renovated it, marrying old and new and creating a home for his family for the next 30 years.

According to Pie, 'bushies make the best clients – they know where the sun comes up', and indeed rural contacts from his boarding school days provided many a commission. 'I did some homesteads early in the piece – Old Southwood at Moonie on the river and Elmes at Augathella. It was a case of Queensland meets Mies van der Rohe. It is possible to have a strong influence of the Australian house and still have a modern building.'

While living in the inner city Brisbane suburb of New Farm, the Pies spent family holidays a 90-minute drive up the coast, at Peregian Beach, staying with an architect friend, Bob Collin. Walking to the local shop in the Christmas holidays of 1984 they saw a block of land for sale. The asking price was $50,000, a substantial sum in those days, but their accountant encouraged them to buy it and build quickly. They took his advice on both counts.

Both Pie and wife Sharon, a product of the National Art School, sketched designs on the back of envelopes and found many similarities when they compared them: separate pavilions, each with two floors held together by a linking deck and following the slope of the land down towards the sea. Neither plan touched the existing trees.

'When you design something, you are very conscious of the spaces you are creating, and the uses demanded of them. The challenge is to imagine, and to hold, the idea, in your head and heart,' says Pie. 'Building is very sculptural and needs to happen in a balanced way.'

While the siting of the house was very obvious, there were anxieties around construction. The climate is subtropical and prone to cyclones and, as the house was built in a sand dune, there was a constant threat of collapse during excavation of the lower floor, or aptly named 'swallows' nest' area, underneath the living room. Their builder, Denis Trethewy, navigated the problems on the site, working in timber, with steel reinforcing the structure to help the building's resistance to cyclones. Zincalume corrugated iron was chosen for the roofing material as a nod to the locale, and Australian hardwood was used as facing to blend with the natural setting. The plan of the house skilfully facilitated a comfortable internal life through neutralising the more extreme aspects of the climate.

'A house that would be totally open to, as well as totally protected from, the elements: such was the planning goal Pie set himself,' says architectural photographer and writer Reiner Blunck, who covered the house for prestigious Italian architectural magazine _Abitare_ (issue 265) not long after it was completed. Pie's philosophy can be boiled down even further – 'Face it north-east and let the air flow through.'

The entrance to the house unfolds in layers. It is set back from the street and presents a long, simple horizontal façade of beautifully weathered Australian hardwood boards, fixed vertically. The strip of timber 'hoppers', painted blue, provides through ventilation and also protection from the sun on the south-western side, and the large lattice gates (originally stained a Chinese red) allow glimpses of the house's inner life while facilitating the all-important airflow. Only one window – lozenge-shaped, revealing a nautical mindset – faces the street. It is a very restrained façade for the mid-Eighties when the excesses of post-modernism were very much de rigueur, yet still sets up the sense of simplified forms, textures and colours within the confines of an elongated timber box-like structure.

'Through the lattice gates into the generous space for beach towels and surfboards, one sees over the lower courtyard, through to the house and to the bush land beyond,' says Pie. 'It is a progressive experience that can't be taken in all at once.'

The plan of the house is simple and effective for the needs of a large family who love to entertain, often on a sizeable scale. The bedrooms are at the top of the back pavilion looking out to the view. They are not fully enclosed; a lattice wall from each opens to the corridor, again increasing airflow. Only the master bedroom, at the end of the corridor, has a more traditional treatment. On ground level is a marvellous open bathroom, terracotta tiled, with a large cast-iron roll-top bath in the centre. A wall of glass looks out to an enclosed garden area, creating an airy, open feeling while maintaining privacy from the street. Sharon Pie tells of how, after winning the Robin Boyd Award, the house was photographed and displayed in an exhibition in the city. Unfortunately, a flood of complaints from people upset at the daring of the bathroom meant the photograph had to be removed.

The internal courtyard, protected by a large sailcloth, is a perfect zone for entertaining and leads into the open-plan living, dining and kitchen area. Downstairs is a self-contained flat (the swallows' nest), accessed by external stairs. Sharon explains: 'We had no internal stairs on purpose. It meant people could visit but wouldn't have to eat every meal with us. It gave them independence.'

Pie's pragmatic approach, and his sense of aesthetics being shaped first and foremost by function, can be witnessed throughout the house – the area for the dumping of beach paraphernalia; the separation of the bedrooms from the living area; the minimal use of dividing walls; the outside shower with pandanus trees to soak up the water, and the large bathroom incorporating the laundry.

The generous kitchen/dining/living space, although common today, was innovative in the Eighties. It was large and open enough to hold classes for a friend's cookery demonstrations while showcasing the qualities of the house to a new local audience.

One of the most distinctive aspects of the house is its use of colour. It enlivens the structure and takes it beyond the neutral palette often used in conjunction with natural timbers. Walls and ceiling in the main living area are a subtle pale pink, because it was felt that after a day at the beach the eyes needed something softer than an intense white, while a love of the local banksia flowers inspired the yellow used in the bedrooms. The strong Aegean blue powder coating of the window frames was the result of a trip to Greece. 'That Grecian blue had a strong subliminal effect,' says Sharon. 'We would get samples and sit on the block and look at the colours. It took a long time to resolve, and when we ordered it we thought, "what have we done?"' They were, however, confident that the detailing on the house was good enough to carry it off. In addition, the Chinese red of the latticework and apple green for rendered walls all work together to complement the landscape – the earth, the sea, the sky, the flora and fauna. The RAIA jury commented that the use of colour 'gave vitality to appearance, but no more'.

The immediate landscape of banksias and casuarinas is very much part of the house, as it is visible from all internal and external points, while the sea, 200 metres away, is heard rather than seen. The original path and bridge, over a hind dune lake, from the house to the beach is no longer in use, but the importance of the connection between house and site cannot be underestimated.

After the ceremony at which the house received the prestigious 1986 RAIA Robin Boyd Award for Residential Buildings, the president of the jury, David Jackson said, 'Don't get too cocky, Pie, it was your wife's cooking that won the day.' But both Geoffrey and Sharon believe it is the atmosphere of the house that swung it – the jury spent time there, and in doing so could understand the simple pleasures it offered – the ease, the lack of demand, the manipulation of air and light and the successful siting. They were, above all, true to the spirit of Robin Boyd.

The entrance area was designed with practicality in mind. Towels, surfboards, wetsuits and swimming costumes can be left propped against the walls or draped over the railings. The broad timber steps doubled as seating during the many Pie parties. The open door leads through to the bathroom.

DETAILS THE PIE HOUSE

LOZENGE WINDOW The lozenge window is one of the signature shapes in the building, although Pie now describes it as a folly. Set into the vertical boards, which have become silver over time, the window refers to Pie's nautical bent and forms an interesting counterpoint to the weathered boards. The blue of the powder-coated metal surround was decided upon after the visual impact of the Aegean blues captured the Pies' imagination on a trip to Greece. Internally the wall is painted a canary yellow and the window takes on a different feel from that perspective. In a predominantly rectilinear structure, the ship-like opening nods to its location by the sea.

HOPPER WINDOWS Through ventilation was the goal with this house. The design ensures protection from the elements – the wind (it is a cyclone-prone area) and the sun – while maintaining optimum flow through of breezes. One way Pie approached this was with hopper windows. Made of timber, these slim rectangular openings can be fixed to stay open and allow airflow while not permitting sun penetration as glazing would. By painting them a soft blue and positioning them to run the length of the south-west elevation, they become one of the main design elements of the façade.

OUTDOOR ZONES  The Pies often had a minimum of six children at the house on weekends and were also enthusiastic entertainers. With this in mind, there is an air of practicality about the design of the house. Various entertaining places are contained within its footprint and the entry zone was specifically designed as a dumping ground for post-beach towels and surfboards. The 50 mm powder-coated aluminium railings running around the interior space were intended for hanging things out to dry. The outdoor shower was in constant use – so much so that they planted pandanus trees to soak up the water.

LATTICE Pie makes much use of lattice, both internally and externally. When used at the front of the house, it is stained a rich Chinese red while inside it is left in a raw timber state. From the front, the four lattice doors not only allow the house to breathe but also provide glimpses to its interior life. Inside, the lattice is used in conjunction with the hopper windows to maintain airflow. It also serves to screen, but not shut in, the bedrooms (which have windows facing the deck, the view and the second living pavilion) while adding to the relaxed holiday house atmosphere.

KITCHEN The exposed kitchen was very simply conceived and housed at the south-eastern end of the open living and dining area. At one time the house was used to host cooking schools and, though small, the kitchen is well designed with a functional pantry area, which includes additional storage and surfaces, to its right side. The house is robust with fussy design details reduced for the sake of easy cleaning. For example, the olive green drawers in the kitchen have no handles (just 25 mm gaps between them to act as handles), the bench is hard-wearing stainless steel and the island is topped in thick timber. These original choices mean the house has worn extremely well.

TEMPERATURE CONTROL The structure is of timber reinforced with steel to withstand cyclones, and the external cladding makes use of layers of fibre cement for waterproofing with a cladding of rough sawn hardwood boards. Leaving airspace of 20 mm has the effect of shading the walls in a way that no overhanging eaves could achieve. The sailcloth covering the courtyard was always part of the scheme, especially as this courtyard was originally furnished as an outdoor living room. Although the Pies lost a couple of sailcloths to cyclones, it is an essential part of the design, which the new owners have retained to ensure the outdoor area remains protected.
1984–1985 THE PALM BEACH HOUSE
KEN WOOLLEY

Woolley's weekender, a sensitively designed timber tower, sits on a steep site 200 metres from the ocean. The entrance can be seen tucked under the trellised deck area.

The sandstone cliff face is integral to the character of the site.

'THE GENERATING CONCEPT OF THE DESIGN IS THE IDEA OF A JOURNEY ALONG A PATH THAT COMMENCES AT THE LOWER PART OF THE SITE, WINDS UP THROUGH THE STEEP LANDSCAPING, CLIMBS THROUGH THE THREE LEVELS WITHIN THE HOUSE, BRANCHES OFF THE LIVING ROOM TO GIVE ACCESS TO OPEN AND COVERED TERRACES CONNECTING WITH ROCK SHELVES IN THE CLIFF FACE AND CONTINUES UP THE SITE BEYOND THE HOUSE.' JENNIFER TAYLOR, ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIAN

The exterior dining area, adjacent to the main living space, makes the connection between the secure wall of the cliff face and the house.

Ken Woolley's love of the glassed-in verandahs of his childhood family holidays influenced the design of the banks of windows facing the view out towards Barrenjoey Head.

The open-plan living area, with beams and rafters visible, combines the customised joinery of the built-in L-shaped sofa with simple furniture pieces in keeping with the house's unpretentious and relaxed aesthetic.

I INTERVIEW KEN WOOLLEY, AND WE PHOTOGRAPH his Palm Beach weekender, in the final week of his 25-year ownership. We sit overlooking Barrenjoey Head, on one of the three decks, which not only form a distinctive part of the house plan, but also illustrate something of his determination as an architect to find new solutions. 'One fairly unusual idea on a steep site like this is to put the balconies at the back and side of the house, instead of on the view side,' says Woolley. 'The cliff wall is part of its character and all the spaces are connected to the ground – it creates a different class of space.'

And indeed there is no sense of the precariousness often felt on a balcony high above ground level. These spaces are anchored and each offers a varied experience: there is a sheltered courtyard, a covered area that acts as an outdoor entertaining room and a third platform to enjoy the view and take the sun.

Woolley is no stranger to awkward, steep sites as the three award-winning houses he has built for himself (Mosman, Paddington and Palm Beach) have all had this problem to overcome. The Mosman House (1962) was one of the most significant houses of its time as it represented the quintessential Sydney School style. Of timber, brick and tile, its strong central idea was a garden terrace stepping down the slope; the level of crafted detail was extraordinary. The house is immaculately preserved by the present owners, who plan to leave it to The Historic Houses Trust.

Woolley's tendency to do things differently has often attracted criticism. 'One of the things that used to be said about me was that my buildings are too diverse, too different,' he says. 'My response is that they have all been approached fresh and I am trying to find what the building ought to be rather than trying to represent myself.'

One suspects Woolley has always been different and has never been afraid to be himself. He grew up in Sydney in a family of extremely modest means and shared a house with his grandmother. His mother was artistic and musical, and fostered Woolley's interest in art, while his father was a craftsman who worked for a period as a fine art printer. The discipline of printing with seven colour plates gave him an eye for detail and an ability to spot if something was a fraction out. Something Woolley has never forgotten.

'As a child I was always making things. I was the leading exponent of making cubby houses, multi-storeyed structures out of wooden fruit boxes,' he says. 'I made plans of the air raid trench and the vegetable victory gardens.'

When the family bought their first car, they had driving holidays around Australia, one trip taking them as far as Townsville. They stayed in country pubs and Woolley remembers the rows of beds lined up on the four-metre-wide covered verandahs where he slept alongside the commercial travellers. As he got older these trips became a chance to observe, and record, Australian vernacular architecture. His drawings were executed with an early type of felt pen, crude and thick 'like a thumb nail dipped in tar', according to Woolley, giving his impressions a bold, distinctive appearance.

He was schooled at Daceyville Primary, a selective feeder to Sydney Boys High, where he studied Russian, Latin, French and English to Intermediate level, and enjoyed the parallel universe of hanging out with his local 'golfing gang' and fostering ambitions to be a professional golfer, as some of his friends did.

The impetus to become an architect came from his mother, 'a very intelligent woman, rather thwarted by circumstances, who felt that architecture was a profession for someone who could draw – it became a sort of family assumption'.

Through a family friend Woolley was introduced to the Government Architect, Cobden Parkes. 'He was a very affable man and was aware that we didn't have any money so he encouraged me to apply for a traineeship,' says Woolley. At 16 he was seconded to the Government Architect's Branch of the NSW Public Works Department. Assistant Government Architect Harry Rembert ran the design room; Peter Webber was the first trainee to be taken on, Woolley the second. He was at first limited to running errands and elementary drafting, along with holiday stints in country offices such as Bathurst until, at the age of 18, he was allowed to work in the city office. By then Woolley was getting good results at the University of Sydney (he was top of his year from 1950) and Rembert realised he had stumbled on a valuable resource. 'They recruited the top student three years in a row [Peter Hall followed Woolley] and the Public Service Board became enthusiastic and increased their intake,' says Woolley.

The dining and kitchen area is warmed with a woodburning stove in winter and cooled with ceiling fans in summer. The simplicity of the timber interior with its exposed one-wall kitchen acknowledges the idea that a holiday house can have a different sensibility from that of an everyday residence.

As a very young man Woolley worked on large commissions, including the Chemistry School at the University of Sydney with Harry Rembert and Peter Webber, and undertook his first solo commission for the Chapel and Sisters Home, St Margaret's Hospital, when he was 22. Although young, Woolley acknowledges that he was 'a fairly demanding person, and I made sure that I got what I wanted. There isn't a lot of point otherwise.'

In the post-war period, building was booming and Woolley admits that he had tremendous opportunities through the Public Works Department. 'It had the best work. It had the entire State building budget for schools, police stations and government offices. When I joined it in 1952 there were six in the department, when I left in 1964 there were 25.'

Scholarships allowed him to travel. In 1953 he went to Melbourne where he met Robin Boyd, Peter McIntyre, Roy Grounds and John and Phyllis Murphy, Neil Clerehan and Kevin Borland. 'They took us around all their buildings. Melbourne was the star place because of that lot.'

Graduating in 1955 with first class honours and the university medal, travel overseas opened his eyes further. In 1956, with the funds from the Byera Hadley Scholarship to pay the return passage to Europe, he met up with Peter Webber in London, and they visited Finland and Alvar Aalto's office. 'Here were the clues as to where modernism was going to move ahead, out of the International School,' says Woolley. 'Le Corbusier was also moving into a new period and I visited his just completed Jaoul houses. The people who lived there saw me hovering at the gate and called me in for a glass of wine and a tour.'

While Webber returned to Sydney, Woolley took the opportunity to work with London architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon on the Golden Lane Estate, a bombsite near St Paul's Cathedral. Having just won the competition for the Barbican development, their reputation was in the ascendancy. Travelling through France, Austria, Spain and Italy, Woolley sent back detailing for the St Margaret's Hospital chapel dome via airmail letters and arrived back in Sydney as its construction began. The following year came the commission to the Government Architect and T.E. O'Mahony for Fisher Library at the University of Sydney, with Woolley as design architect, a major undertaking given its context and significance.

Architect Philip Cox, a student at the time, felt that this was 'the most contemporary building in Sydney in front of the neo-gothic of Blacket's grand university'.

The next phase of Woolley's career took a very different tack. In 1958 he and Michael Dysart won the Taubman's Family Home Competition through the _Australian Women's Weekly_ and this led Woolley to contemplate 'the whole process of economy'. Three new designs for the Lend Lease Carlingford exhibition (a public exhibition of architect-designed project homes by well-known names) followed in 1961. Through this, Woolley met Brian Pettit and Ron Sevitt, who were in the process of setting up their own company after the collapse of Sunline Homes, a big player in the project homes market.

Pettit & Sevitt set itself apart by declaring itself, according to Woolley, 'absolutely modern with no compromise towards the more conservative mindset'. There was certainly a market among those who wanted an alternative to the standard builder offering but couldn't afford a bespoke architect-designed home. Of the 4000-plus Ken Woolley-designed houses throughout Australia, most were executed under the Pettit & Sevitt brand with the 'Split Level' and 'Lowline' proving the most popular.

Jennifer Taylor comments: 'Perhaps Woolley's major contribution to Australian architecture has been the role he played in raising the quality of the average suburban house – an outstanding achievement by any standard.' Woolley saw the houses as akin to product design, and met with hundreds of clients to discuss modifications, which often informed future design development of the homes. 'By the end, we had 20 different versions developed over 15 years,' he says. All this experience did not go to waste; in 2010 a revived Pettit & Sevitt released three of the designs, rethought for a contemporary market, and introduced 'Hillside', designed specifically for steep sites.

The staircase of irregularly stacked boxes doubles as storage space. For children, the climb is the start of a journey to a special sleeping platform and the outdoor bridge beyond.

In 1962 Fisher Library won the Sulman Medal, and the Mosman House won the Wilkinson. It was time to strike out. There would be enough money generated from work with Pettit & Sevitt to justify leaving the Government Architect's office. This coincided with an approach from the University of Newcastle to design a new Union building and, almost simultaneously, prestigious firm Ancher Mortlock and Murray asking him to become a partner.

Woolley has made it clear that while he approaches each challenge with a fresh eye and a new set of solutions, he is cautious of 'wandering into innovation for its own sake'. His creative process is to formulate a strong central idea by establishing the ground rules of purpose, resources and client needs, and discovering what has the potential to satisfy. 'As Picasso said, "I don't seek, I find,"and as you head towards the realisation of an idea you discover things – a whole set of subordinate ideas,' says Woolley. 'Some of these are in the direction of the building and some are in the artistic expression of the building. The problem is balancing your developmental ideas with your central idea.'

While living in his Wilkinson Award-winning Paddington House (1980), which he describes as a 'modern and personal townhouse', he began to look for a weekender. 'We looked all the way up the coast, at farms and so forth, and eventually decided that travel could be the killer and that we couldn't do better than here.' The site was, he says, 'unviable', but he set about searching for the idea, exploring what differentiated a holiday house from a permanent residence. 'This is a place to play, like camping or on a yacht. There are different expectations of privacy and space.'

The drawing makes clear the 'tower' design and the three layers that comprise the building.

The site was not only steep but had the constraint of a watercourse running through it. 'I liked the notion of having a small footprint, and the idea of a tower-like house, which would in itself be a staircase up the cliff terminating in a bridge at the back, evolved.'

Certain memories, experiences and philosophical ideas were also to influence his thinking. As a child he spent summer holidays at Lake Macquarie. 'My cousin had a cottage there, right on the water, with a jetty. I have always had some affection for a typical timber house with a glassed-in verandah,' he says.

He also refers to Harry Rembert's weekender in the Blue Mountains. 'Harry was a very good architect who did some outstanding public buildings, but it was his weekender that was a great influence on me.' Rembert built his house in the 1930s and added to it in the Forties. It was clad in fence palings and the interior walls were lined in Caneite, low-density fibreboard made from cane fibre. 'All the rooms here are lined with a similar low density fibreboard, just as Harry did.'

Another influence was the work of the California-based architect and academic Christopher Alexander, who wrote, among other things, _A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction_ and _The Timeless Way of Building_. Alexander studied building types, posed theories as to why windows with small panes are a good thing and developed a language of scale that maintained the smallest detail should be only 6 mm in order to have the necessary range of scale in a building. For Woolley he provided an interesting move out of the direct modernist identification style into a more free style while still maintaining connection to purpose.

The decision was taken to construct the house in timber for both aesthetic and practical reasons. 'Nowadays we would use a crane or inclinator with a builders' kit but those weren't around in the Eighties so that was one reason for keeping the structure lightweight.'

Given the steepness of the slope and the unstable ground, Woolley conceived a ladder-like concrete base, made up of a series of beams laid on the ground (rather than cut into it), following the slope and providing a base for the column supports. The concrete frames are tied to the rock and locked in with four metre rock bolts.

'We tried to remove some of the double purposes of structure by having this internal post and beam frame which runs right down through the house, one metre from the external perimeter walls,' he explains. 'This holds most of the load and the one-metre zone is used for seating, storage and the stairs.' It is described in _Australian Architects: Ken Woolley_ as the timber frame version of the thick wall concept.

The house is formed in three layers, vertically. There is the living area on top with windows spanning three sides, rather like the closed-in verandahs of his childhood; the bedroom layer, with small windows and externally clad in hardwood timbers, and the lower section, which has lattice panel infills and bracing.

Internally the living space is of open construction with beams and rafters visible. The detailing is simple and honest – surface mounted bolts; ring-pull openers for cupboards, recalling a ship's chandlery; mesh panels in kitchen cupboard doors echoing meat safes and tiny dowels providing a resting place for timber vents above casement windows. According to Woolley, the importance of detail is the same as that of a word in a poem, and so they must not be replaced by others in the building process.

Woolley describes himself as diffident, and what is important to him, as an architect, is judgment. As he says, 'The underlying sensibilities that lead to the judgments involved are what count – the feeling of what is right – of appropriateness and harmony.'

A playful element is found in the box-like stairs, leading up from the living area to a tiny loft space, popular with his children and, later, his grandchildren, and out across the bridge that in turn leads to the rocky plateau above. The garden has been landscaped, native trees and bushes planted and the overgrowth of lantana removed. The house sits very comfortably in its natural setting, the cliff face forming a secure wall for the outdoors space, the bridge ingeniously linking it to its site. The house won the Wilkinson Award and the Robin Boyd Award in 1987 with the jury comments that 'Ken Woolley's quiet imagination has made a lovely place, with care and deep thought to be found everywhere...it is safe to say Robin Boyd would have loved it, but then it is also a place any sensitive person would love.'

An influence on Woolley was his long held appreciation for mentor Harry Rembert's cottage in the Blue Mountains, with its walls of Caneite. The material, shown here, creates a warm enclosure emphasised by the small, precise, window.

DETAILS THE PALM BEACH HOUSE

CONNECTION TO THE SITE This is a house with several sorts of outdoor space – for dining or for taking in the view – but common to them all is the way in which they connect to the cliff face and the ground. Balconies by their very nature tend to suggest a space connected only to the house, and facing, where possible, a view. The way in which Woolley subverts this notion and places them at the side and the back creates, in his own words, 'a different class of space'. This sense of connection is made clear by the walkway linking the house to the cliff, so that the cliff becomes part of the character of the house.

BOOKSHELF In awarding the Palm Beach House the Robin Boyd Award in 1987, the jury remarked that this was a house designed 'with care and deep thought everywhere'. This is notable in the simple detailing in the bedroom. The walls are fashioned from Caneite (a fibreboard made from cane), a material Woolley saw used in his mentor Harry Rembert's 1930s cottage in the Blue Mountains. The small shelf for books above the door in the hallway is also used in the bedrooms. It is a thoughtful detail, which befits a weekender where reading and relaxing are the order of the day.

BATHROOM  Woolley was living in Sydney's Paddington when the notion of a weekender took hold. When he found the site he was very conscious that in designing a weekender he was 'playing a very different game'. While he acknowledged there had to be some indications of permanent living, he held fast to the notion that there were elements of camping or a yacht that had an appeal. To this end the functional spaces – the kitchen and bathroom – are kept spare and minimal. The timber-crafted bathroom with slatted wooden floor would not be out of place on a rather large yacht.

TIMBER BEAMS Tallowwood has been stained grey, where it has been used externally, but left unpainted when used for beams internally. The roof lining is pine, again stained a soft grey. The structure is exposed to express a sense of honesty and simplicity with surface-mounted bolts adding to this impression. Woolley tried to remove some of the double purpose of structure by having this kind of internal post and beam frame, which runs right down through the house a metre from the walls and holds most of the load. The zone between is used for built-in seating and stairwell.

KITCHEN The small exposed kitchen is beautifully resolved with open shelves of celery top pine and glazing behind the workbench to connect it visually to the rock face behind. The cupboards recall old meat safes in their design, with mesh panels fixed behind the timber grids. As with so many aspects of this house, its effectiveness results from the quiet quality of the detailing borne from Woolley's interest in the language of scale in architecture and his belief that detail in a building holds the same importance as a word in a poem.

FOOTINGS AND TRELLIS The concept of the house as a 'small wooden tower' in three layers permits the building to have a relatively small footprint on the steep site. In order to lock the building to its site, Woolley devised a concrete ladder-like form of a series of beams laid on top of the ground, following the slope of the land and providing a base for the supports. The structural underside of the building is infilled with trellis; the bedroom level has only small windows, and the living space has glazing on three sides recalling the glassed-in verandahs of Woolley's youth.
1988-1990 THE HILDEBRAND HOUSE
ROBINSON CHEN

The audacious curves of the Hildebrand House present a challenging façade in a small coastal town of predominantly fibro and timber holiday houses.

The contrast of textured and matt painted surfaces is made all the more apparent by the fall of natural light.

'WHERE WE MIGHT TYPICALLY EXPECT THE HOLIDAY BEACH HOUSE AS A LIGHTWEIGHT AFFAIR, SUSPENDED MID-AIR BY STILTS AND COLUMNS, PERISCOPING OUTWARDS TOWARDS THE VIEW, THIS BEASTIE BUNKERS DOWN ANCHORING INTO THE GROUND, SECURING ITS HOLD ON THE LANDSCAPE.' ANNA JOHNSON, _MONUMENT_

The dining area, adjacent to the partitioned-off kitchen, illustrates the subtle geometry of the interior walls and the success of the nuanced colour palette.

The living area is simply furnished with modernist pieces and an anglepoise lamp repainted a vibrant yellow. The room is lit naturally via the wall of windows facing the creek and the skylight, which illuminates the rear of the room. The painted partition wall houses hidden storage enabling the room to remain spare.

THE MORE I'M EXPOSED TO ARCHITECT-DESIGNED houses, and attempt to understand what sets the great apart from the good, the more I realise the power of the architect/client relationship.

For many of the houses in this book, the architects are their own client and so have to satisfy only themselves – there are no distracting demands, tastes and idiosyncrasies of a third party. Yet in every instance, where an enlightened client has commissioned the work, the resulting building is a pure product of that relationship. It can manifest itself in different ways. It can be intense, collaborative and prolonged, such as Richard Leplastrier and the Palm House. Or it can be something that springs from utter trust and minimal involvement, in which the client gives a brief and signs off on a scheme, as in the case of Melbourne architect Kai Chen and clients Denis and Janice Hildebrand. In both instances the vision and integrity are retained, and the houses, through lack of creative compromise, achieve a timelessness and, often, a greatness.

What has also endured is a tremendous friendship. I meet Chen and the Hildebrands over lunch and they tease and quip and reminisce. This house, which was built 20 years ago and refurbished two years ago ('We ran everything past Chen,' says Denis Hildebrand) still delights them all and it is clear that only with clients like this does architectural experimentation flourish.

The Hildebrands, no strangers to commissioning architect-designed houses, had engaged Borland & Brown Architects (Kevin Borland was a leading Melbourne architect and part of the intellectual Left), to undertake a major renovation of their Frankston house. They met Chen, who was then a student in the architectural office and was working on the detailing of their kitchen. They liked him, remembered him and looked him up when they were planning to build in Somers.

Chen had come to Borland's office by way of an education in Malaysia and Melbourne University. He is honest about his failings there. 'I have always preferred to learn by doing, and at university I had a disconnect between the teaching of subjects such as chemistry and physics, so I struggled.' One day while driving around looking at the distinctive houses in the Melbourne suburbs of Eltham and Warrandyte, he came across a house that interested him and, emboldened by curiosity, he knocked on the door. 'The couple were very generous. We went in and spent the day there and I was so smitten by the house – the Colvin House (1974) seemed to me like early Gehry – that I knew I wanted to work with Kevin Borland,' he says.

At the time the area was bush with unmade roads and septic systems, 'with the rainwater tank very much integral to the house design. Quite a number of Borland houses were owner-built and this was one of them,' recalls Chen.

He joined Borland's practice as a fourth-year student in 1978, staying for his fifth year and for a year after graduation. It was late in the practice by that stage, and many talented architects, including major names like Morrice Shaw and John Kenny, had already passed through the office. 'Borland was very socially minded and he injected a sense of conscience and community into how we worked and thought,' says Chen. 'He was talking about community long before it was fashionable and his practice attracted a particular type of architect and client.'

Indeed throughout his career, Borland was at the forefront of Melbourne's architectural scene. He assisted with The Age Small Homes Service (previously run by Robin Boyd and, later, Neil Clerehan), which took a democratic approach to architecture, allowing the public access to a range of architect-designed houses at an affordable rate. Through this process he met a couple for whom he designed the Rice House (1952–53), using a pioneering system called Ctesiphon, whereby concrete is thinly spread over hessian and chicken-wire stretched across timber formwork. This inventive house is made up of a series of arches, and, given the post-war scarcity of materials, made good use of very little.

Borland was also part of the winning bid (alongside Phyllis and John Murphy and Peter McIntyre) for the radical Olympic Swimming Pool (1952–56). A member of the Communist Party and dedicated to socialist principles, he saw the Preshil School (1962) as a key project as the input of students was sought as part of the democratic design process.

While many of these groundbreaking projects were long behind the practice by the time Chen joined it, the culture continued and the spirit of community dominated. He considered this first choice of a major mentor highly significant. 'You could end up a very different person and a different architect if you made the wrong choice at this early stage. To this day I feel I owe everything to Kevin.'

After graduation Chen, 'unemployed and unemployable', set up on his own. In an attempt to make ends meet, he wrote about architecture for _The Age_ newspaper and interviewed Ian Robinson, who studied with him at university. They formed Robinson Chen in 1980.

While no longer together (the Hildebrand House was at the tail end of their partnership and completed by Chen), he is proud of their accomplishments. 'We were better together than either of us is apart. People who worked with us would say the same. We were incredibly linked, the work was intuitive, rapid and the product of a close understanding.'

The Eighties was a period of intense innovation, multiple projects and award-winning work for Robinson Chen. For example, the Peel House (Mikado) in Rye (1982) won the RAIA Merit Award for Outstanding Architecture (New) and the President's Award for Young Architects in the same year. With its cubic form and distinctive sliced corner entrance, it is described on the Victoria Heritage Listing website as 'a fine and early manifestation of the Deconstructionist branch of post-modernism'.

In 1987 Denis Hildebrand approached the firm to design a beach house on land in Somers, a small coastal town on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula. Located on Merrick's Creek, looking towards Westernport Bay and Phillip Island, the site was originally that of a general store servicing Lord Somers Camp, a summer camp engineered to bring together boys from a cross-section of society, and after which the township was named.

'We saw a photo of the creek in an estate agent's window and yet when we came to the address it wasn't visible,' says Denis Hildebrand. 'Only when you walked through the site did you see it and it felt like something of a surprise.'

This sense of delayed gratification is something that Chen took to heart in the planning of the house. 'It was to be a sanctuary for Denis and Janice so we took more of an introspective view of things and tried as best we could to tuck the building into the topography,' he said. 'It was the joy of burrowing into the ti trees, feeling the water, smelling it but not seeing it until the last minute, and then finally arriving at the beach"that drove the project.'

The first proposal was for a two-storey L-shaped configuration but its siting was deemed too close to the creek for comfort. Back at the drawing board this scheme emerged. 'When we drew the damned thing up, it looked weird: the elevation was odd-looking but we liked that, it seemed to come from some other place, and the fact that we didn't fully understand it didn't worry us,' says Chen.

The Hildebrands, however, did seem to understand it. 'Immediately we saw the layout, we could see the quality. It was like a little diamond – small and tight with many facets to its exterior,' says Denis.

It was clear when it came to building that traditional processes would not apply. 'The integration of the structure, the servicing, the crafting, the building and the plan all had to come together,' says Chen. 'The engineers worked out how we would build it and then we had immense freedom.' While it appears at first as off-form concrete, the construction is in fact a timber-framed structure, with bracing plywood inside and out. The external layer of cement render acts as a skin and is applied over galvanised mesh. While the materials had altered, the method itself is not significantly different from the Ctesiphon system Borland used on the Rice House. One of the Hildebrands' requests, apart from practicalities such as the number of rooms and so on, was that it be 'built like a brick dunny', to withstand the strong winds. Using a team of good builders and trusted carpenters, who had worked with Robinson Chen over the previous 10 years and were, presumably, no strangers to new ways of doing things, the building went up over a 12-month period. What emerged is known to locals as 'The Somers Opera House'.

The sculptural concrete stairs lead from the bedroom and bathroom level where you enter the house to the living and dining level above. At the top of the stairs is the 'reveal' of the view and the clear connection to the outdoors is apparent.

Facing the street are sweeping curves and audacious angles; a low wall partially masks the small bedroom windows and so there is little interface on the building's public side. It is a dark, dense object and the only aspect denoting domesticity is its scale. Even the front door, timber and painted fire engine red, is tucked away at the end of a curved wall. And here begins a journey into colour and geometry. Part of the appeal of the house is the way in which it treats opposites, so that they support, rather than detract from, one another. The exterior is sombre and sculptural while the interior is a richly nuanced play of colours, textures and light. The street façade contrasts with that of the more conventional waterside one, with its full-height sliding doors set in a long horizontal window wall leading out to the garden and the creek. The view is fragmented by a series of strong vertical columns, set at rhythmic intervals, an effect achieved, Chen admits, by channelling Le Corbusier's monastery at La Tourette.

These columns are treated in the same way externally and internally, and echo the texture and colour of the exterior, hence linking the two façades. Yet again there is that play of opposites, and Chen points out: 'The house is radical from the street but when you look back from the creek, it blends into the surrounds.'

Chen talks of his 'intuitive response to the site' and indeed the two characters of the house are defined by the natural landfall, which formed two levels – lower to the north, stepped up to the south. The ground floor holds three small bedrooms (one with an ensuite) and a bathroom. The corridor wall slopes inward as it curves towards the master bedroom and is illuminated by a series of five fluorescent tube lights sliced vertically into the wall. Strongly coloured joinery and masonry in ochre, teal blue and mauve combine with the geometry of angled doors and tilted lines to give this zone its distinct character.

The stairs linking the bedroom level with the living/dining and kitchen floor are a beautiful example of off-form concrete, designed with pleasing irregularity and sculptural sensitivity. At the top, the turn into the main area reveals the view and makes a sudden connection with the natural world. 'The reward at the end of the journey,' as Chen puts it. While this level is more conventional in its dimensions, and conforms more often to right angles, again colour plays a key role. The ceiling is painted navy blue and floats like a night sky. Chen wanted to create the feeling of camping under the stars – as though one has thrown a tarpaulin over a crevice between rocks on a beach, and is living by the borrowed light of the moon and the stars. The experience makes a clear distinction to that of being in the city. It is a primal notion and is a far cry from the halogen light-studded ceilings of many contemporary houses.

The corridor to the bedrooms and bathroom is dynamic, with panels of solid colour and curved and angled walls. The recessed strip lighting adds to the effect.

Bedrooms are sparsely furnished, but the interest comes through the mix of wall textures and the slices of light, both natural and artificial.

Indeed, the combined management of light, colour and texture is remarkable within the house. 'Ian and I were interested in colour – initially in the Mexican palette of Luis Barragán – and the amazing effect it could have on strong form,' says Chen. 'But for this project I had moved onto muted colours and this scheme emerged. It is unique and I haven't used it since.'

Smooth matt walls contrast with a textured effect achieved by pebbles dragged through the render and then coloured to mimic concrete, albeit with a metallic sheen. This rawness, set against the precision of the painted surfaces, is made all the more apparent by the narrow strip of natural light seeping through the gap between the ceiling and the back wall.

'You are very conscious of the render, and the different light patterns throughout the day, but particularly in the late afternoon as the sun sets,' says Chen.

The kitchen is set behind a coloured partial wall, which neither reaches the ceiling nor spans the entire breadth of the space. One side is the open entrance and on the other a lowered cabinet painted a glossy black allows visual access. The geometry is one of squares in a mix of colour (grey and red) and scale; narrow your eyes and it becomes painterly like the work of the Russian constructivist artist Kazimir Malevich.

During my research I came across a photograph of the young Kai Chen standing in front of the just completed Hildebrand House in 1990. He was featured in an article by Davina Jackson in _Vogue Living_ magazine showcasing the young Turks of Australian architecture, and she notes that his 'methods result from a combination of oriental intuition, deep contemplation and sensitive intelligence'. The Hildebrand House was to bring him even greater exposure when a year later, in 1991, it was prominently featured in the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

'Neville Quarry was the Australian Commissioner and wanted to feature the house in the exhibition,' says Chen. 'John Gollings took one black and white exterior photograph and blew it up so that it filled the back wall at the end of a passage. You couldn't miss it.'

Denis Hildebrand and Chen made the trip together and there was much excitement when Neville Quarry arranged for his friend Frank Gehry to visit the pavilion. Denis was there with his movie camera to record the famous architect walk up to the work, walk away and return for a thoughtful second look. Architect Jean Nouvel came with Jack Lang, the French Minister for Culture, who wondered out loud as to the location of the front door.

Looking back from the creek onto the upper level, housing the living and dining areas and kitchen, it is hard to reconcile the two 'faces' of the house. From this aspect it sits discreetly on the site in a modest and measured way.

'The Biennale was an extraordinary time with incredible people interested in the work and magazines worldwide picking up on it,' says Chen. It is a shared anecdote, which both architect and client enjoy in equal measure, and forms part of their shared history.

The collaboration continues to this day: Chen is working with them at present on a property in the Melbourne suburb of South Yarra.

Robinson Chen was a practice that, as Borland's did earlier, nurtured a new generation of successful architects – Shelley Penn and Kerstin Thompson among others. Of that time spent working as a student, Thompson says, 'Chen was remarkably astute. He had the ability to quickly find your strengths and capabilities and to draw out your best. This was most marked with Ian Robinson. Ian would create these wonderful 3-D drawings and models and Chen would draw up the plan in red pencil, creating beautiful layered sketches as he worked and reworked the lines.'

Kevin Borland said that 'architecture is not for the faint-hearted'. In the Hildebrands, Chen found clients prepared to brave the process and in doing so they won the prize – a 'diamond of a house' – one that they continue to enjoy as much now as they did 20 years ago. When I met them I commented that it was not a house designed with an eye for resale. Denis smiled and agreed. One suspects this distinctive house is theirs for life.

DETAILS THE HILDEBRAND HOUSE

PAINTS AND SURFACES The feeling evoked by the textured versus smooth walls is quite pronounced. The textured grey surface, achieved by dragging pebbles through render, feels strong and massive, while the smooth panels are light, almost set-like planes that create a geometric interplay. Within the large rust red wall that divides the lounge area from the stairs, barely visible lines reveal the presence of integrated storage cupboards. The Hildebrands have little by way of display objects to distract from the coloured planes. The intense midnight blue ceiling in the lounge room was chosen to mimic a night sky and is without centralised lighting.

ENTRANCE A curved rendered wall draws the visitor into a gravelled courtyard, with a solitary olive tree, and around to the approach to the house. It comes as quite a surprise that the entrance offers up a bright red door – set deep into a narrow recess and in contrast to the sombre monumentality of the earthy grey render that forms the surface of the building. The red is a promise of what is to come as the interior makes use of a finely tuned palette of colour in the same way that the exterior makes use of a form through uniformity of tone.

BATHROOM ANGLES  The oblique angle of the external wall in the hallway is reiterated in the narrow bathroom, with the exterior wall leaning outwards by around 10 degrees. A long vertical mirror above the basin serves to emphasise the outrageous angle of the external wall. A long slit window, with the vertical part of the window recess painted red, adds dynamism to a bathroom of simple fittings: a bath with wall-mounted shower and a small hand basin. Robinson Chen use slices of natural light to emphasise colour or texture that can be subtle or, in the case of the bathroom, fairly bold.

EXTERIOR The house is as imposing as a small weekender can be. Had it been within the budget, the house would have been constructed in off-form concrete, but a very similar appearance was achieved by the dark painted rendered cement walls. The timber stud walls were covered in expanded mesh finished with a skin of cement render, in much the same way as early Neutra buildings in California. With few windows to the street, it is a very private structure, turning its high, curved back on the streetscape.

WINDOW TREATMENT Looking at the house from the creek is a surprise as the sweeping curve of the roofline of the house is not visible. Instead, a low, gently sloping flat roof is supported by a wall of glass with a repeating pattern of rendered verticals. The overall impression is of a small lightweight structure blending into its surroundings. These windows could have been large spans of glass but Robinson Chen preferred the rhythm of the smaller window openings, which maintain the same rendered cement appearance as the rest of the structure. Chen acknowledges Le Corbusier's monastery at La Tourette as a strong influence.

DIVIDING WALL  The small kitchen is divided from the living/dining area by a partition wall, the same colour and height as the wall dividing the lounge from the stairs. The wall doesn't reach the raked ceiling but creates another geometric play – the perfect square acts as a frame suspended in space. This backdrop of colour is intentionally not totally solid but has a join running through it. Chen felt it was too flat without it and instinctively added this 'negative joint'. The wall conceals kitchen paraphernalia, while allowing conversation and interaction to flow between the two spaces.
1989–1990 THE GARTNER HOUSE
GABRIEL POOLE

The sleeping pavilion of Gabriel Poole's groundbreaking Gartner House sits on an elevated position on Queensland's Mount Tamborine.

The views from the house extend from rainforest to the buildings of the Gold Coast on the horizon.

'POOLE'S IS A FANCIFUL ARCHITECTURE OF FREEDOM. HE DRIVES TO DISSOLVE THE WALL AND CREATE AN UNBOUNDED ARCHITECTURE THAT SUGGESTS THE WISH FOR THE OCCUPANT TO PARTICIPATE DIRECTLY WITH THE IMMEDIATE ENVIRONMENT.' JENNIFER TAYLOR, ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIAN

The covered walkway, accessed only from the garage, ensures privacy and creates a sense of arrival to the house.

The sweep of the custom orb roof and the wall of glazing create a geometry that is Oriental in feel but very Australian in materials and execution.

WHILE STALWARTLY DENYING HE HAS AN architectural philosophy, one only needs to spend 10 minutes with Gabriel Poole for it to come across loud and clear. It is more that he and the philosophy are one – it does not sit on the surface, but is intrinsic to who he is in all matters personal and professional. As architectural historian Jennifer Taylor said to him, 'Gabriel, you have been blessed with a great talent, you should recognise it comes from a higher place, that it does not really belong to you, and that you have a duty to share it.'

There is a cinematic quality to his life and work. His personal story is quintessentially Australian and he is the first to admit that he has created great challenges for himself throughout his long career. It is clear that these challenges have produced great ingenuity. During a period of financial hardship, when circumstances forced him to rethink his approach to architecture, he was engaged by Peter Sachs, a friend and managing director of Sachs and Co., who wanted to explore the idea of demountable housing for remote sites in Papua New Guinea. While the project itself came to nothing, Poole developed a system that initiated the first of what he called the quadropod houses – '105' Noosa Valley (1983) – all lightweight prefabricated buildings, of which the Gartner House is a fine, albeit later, example.

Poole was not one of those architects who knew their destiny from an early age. A rebel as a child, he grew up in Queensland, the son of a Melbourne GP of Irish heritage and an artistic mother, Zelma, who designed the family house in the coastal town of Cleveland.

'Mother was incredible. She was a "bush girl"and she knew the importance of ventilation. She designed a bush seat around the verandah, something I used frequently when I started to design. A lot of my understanding came from her,' says Poole. He credits his mother with developing his sensitive artistic side but also engendering a spirit of endurance. He was skilled at carpentry, and tells the tale of becoming so frustrated when making a wooden boat that he smashed it with an axe and let rip with a full-on temper tantrum. His mother calmly handed him another bit of wood and recommended he start again. 'It was she who first demonstrated to me the quality of gentleness and love, and instilled in me the ability to perceive and appreciate beauty. She also taught me to hang on, to persevere and keep going when the going got tough.'

His time at boarding school during the war was a deeply unhappy experience made tolerable by learning to box and understanding the value in taking an 'offensive' position. Poole's father has been described as formal and distant, illustrated by the fact that only one of his children at a time was allowed to join him for the evening meal. But he was, by all accounts, proud of his son's boxing ability and arranged matches in the school holidays where Gabriel was required to fight much larger boys in the local pub. He hated fighting – 'I was always scared' – but managed to become a schoolboy boxing champion. His schooling was not a success, and he admits he couldn't get out of there fast enough.

At 17, at his own request, he was sent to Gatton Agricultural College where he continued to rebel and provoke, and left after only a year. 'Nobody knew how to handle me. I was a rogue"I must have been really unhappy to be that belligerent,' he says. Running out of options, his mother turned to her friends the Bells, who owned Camboon Station, a 50,000 hectare cattle property on the Dawson River in Queensland.

Poole describes Minette and Bill Bell as a second family and acknowledges their tough love shaped his character for the better. He recalls turning up to the property like 'Roy Rogers without the gun' in a city boy approximation of country clothing – pristine RM Williams boots and moleskins – for his job as a jackaroo. Bill Bell asked him whether he had ever ridden a horse. 'To my reply of no, he said, "Well, that horse over there has never been ridden, so you can both start together".'

He stayed in the old homestead and, as Bruce Walker, author of a book on the life and work of Gabriel Poole, notes that in his lightweight constructions 'many of the principles and materials used in the design of the old homestead were to be incorporated: corrugated steel, curved roofs, open living areas with minimal walls and pavilions connected by covered walkways.'

The work was hard, the climate tough and the physical demands on the jackaroos were greater than others working on the property. He stuck it out for three years, the last two as overseer at Camboon before moving to Cracow and Lisburn Stations. While the experience was the making of him, he had the clear realisation it was not what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

Again, the hand of his mother shaped events. A family friend offered cheap accommodation in a rundown gardener's cottage in return for Poole renovating it. 'With the skills I had learned in the bush, and the sensitivities learnt from my mother, I rebuilt the hut, lined and painted it, and designed and built a new kitchen,' he says.

Several young, cutting-edge Queensland architects, John Dalton, Robin Gibson and Don Winson, were at the party to celebrate the cottage's completion. They were impressed by Poole's innate abilities, and offered him work. 'At the time I was studying for an entrance exam to get into medicine, but these guys seemed to think they could train me up,' he says.

Poole had an old Morris Minor and, as Gibson couldn't drive, would chauffeur him around the various building sites, listening and learning as he went. 'Gibson lumped responsibility onto me,' he recalls. He was a perfectionist and a great teacher, drawing out of Poole what he thought wrong with a particular job, and pointing out to him what he had missed. In parallel to working with Gibson, Poole went to Brisbane Technical College where things went less smoothly. 'I was up with the top in final year design but they failed me in my finals in that subject all the same just to show me that they could,' he says. 'I did challenge them during the course and tell them that they were untalented idiots so that was their revenge.'

In 1964 Poole travelled to London, working first for architects Jim Cadbury-Brown and later Powell & Moya, designing the nurses' quarters for the Wythenshawe Hospital. He tells of visiting the buildings of Le Corbusier (La Tourette and Ronchamp) and how, with particular Poole determination, he climbed into the scaffold–clad Villa Savoye, at Poissy, and took a personal tour of the building during its renovation. While Le Corbusier's mantra of houses as 'machines for living' did not resonate with Poole's humanist streak, he did admire much of the architect's conceptual thinking. The use of _piloti_ (columns which elevate the building above ground level) impressed Poole, and he used them in his Le Corbusier–inspired house for the Fosters in Buderim (1971). More importantly, the idea of elevation above the site became the basis of his thinking as he developed the lightweight quadropod style of building. Alvar Aalto, however, did resonate, and Poole later introduced his work to Lindsay Clare, for whom it became a formative influence.

The dramatic ceiling is the defining feature of the Gartner House: internally, the effect is of two great sailcloths draped to form a roof. This sense of lightness and insubstantiality is made more evident by the broad strip of Perspex that runs the length of the room.

Upon Poole's return to Australia, he momentarily considered a partnership with his mentor Robin Gibson before deciding he needed to move in his own direction. In the first house Poole designed for his family in 1962, the Sherwood House, the Miesian preoccupation of Gibson's influence is evident. It is a beautiful, simple, flat-roofed house of concrete block and fibro cement planned in a U-shape around a central courtyard. His concerns for ventilation and airflow are already at play. By 1967 he had sold Sherwood and, on a block of land bought from his father-in-law in the Brisbane suburb of Graceville, built a timber post-and-beam house using prefabricated elements. Ventilation was addressed by creating a gauzed verandah to the north (a device used in the Camboon homestead) and innovative skylights, with canvas covers, which could be raised in summer for airflow. In winter the canvas was removed and the skylights lay flat and returned to their original function. The move in his own direction had well and truly begun.

His first clients, the Shirens, took a punt on a young architect who delivered a mixture of tradition and innovation. The design used a colonnade of telegraph poles and a tiled pitched roof (most unfashionable at this period) to form deep eaves, while construction adopted prefabricated elements.

The Dobie House (1972), perhaps his best known from this period, illustrated an important development. The site, on the side of Buderim Mountain, was steep and unstable, and his approach was to bore four deep holes in the hillside into which he inserted steel poles to support the base platform. From this point, the prefabricated walls were tilted into position. With little disruption to the land, he managed to skilfully site this modest holiday house with the full span of its majestic view. Stylistically it took its cue from Eames and Ellwood, as Poole comments, 'they did very fine sort of steel architecture and floated their buildings over gullies and hills'. Sadly, the Dobie House has recently been demolished.

While Poole maintains his primary devotion was to housing, he did have a period in the Seventies where his Sunshine Coast office worked with developers designing commercial buildings and apartment blocks. He tells of being interviewed by Jennifer Taylor, who had been following his work. 'What are you doing interviewing me?' asked Poole. 'Gabriel, you are going to be famous, so you had better get used to it,' she replied. Yet a difficult period was to follow and the recession of the early Eighties was to see Poole, carrying substantial financial exposure, declared bankrupt.

Two things carried him through. The tremendous support of his second wife, Elizabeth, and the ability to draw on the lessons he had learnt at the hands of his mother and under the guidance of Bill Bell. He now had both support and resilience. 'It really was the turnaround in my life because I started concentrating on quality architecture. I thought, "Well if I'm going to be involved in architecture then I am going to do what I like",' he says.

With necessity the mother of invention, Poole set about developing a building system for Peter Sachs, who wanted a prefabricated solution that could be carried through the jungle of Papua New Guinea and built without the requirement of heavy machinery and with limited skilled resources.

While it was never used for this purpose Poole successfully used it in his housing commissions. While the '105' Noosa Valley house (1983), which he built for his own family, was the first to exploit this technology, other quadropods followed: the Allen House in Dayboro (1984) saw the system refined and this tiny, elegant house, nicknamed the Samurai House because of its Japanese influence, sits on an Eiffel Tower of legs in the middle of a horse stud farm. The Gloster House was a collaboration with architect Michael Gloster and utilised Poole's '105' system, and the Noble House (1985–86) at Noosa Heads was on a site so steep that it rendered traditional building impossible. Each time, Poole adapted, learnt and added to the core idea of the system. As Elizabeth said, 'Gabriel never does the same house twice. The site and the client mean each house is an individual solution.'

In 1990 the Pooles' own house, the Tent House, in Eumundi, took the architectural world by storm. Friend and architect Lindsay Clare had sent it as part of the Australian submission to the Venice Biennale and he persuaded Poole to enter the house for a RAIA award. Poole had boycotted the institute for decades after a dispute over process, and so it was a major rapprochement for him to enter, and in return they gave the Tent House the Robin Boyd Award. The ensuing publicity generated 3000 enquiries – not one of which resulted in a commission. The downside was that his work was associated with fragility and impermanence. As Jennifer Taylor said, his drive to 'dissolve the wall and create an unbounded architecture' had tremendous freedom and emotional appeal but ultimately the challenge of living that way was too much for most people.

There were, however, clients for whom his work had strong and lasting resonance. Angela Rawnsley had been shown the Noble House by a friend and knew it was exactly what she wanted. She approached Gabriel Poole to say she wanted a house but didn't have the money – just yet. Two years later she came back. 'I had bought the land, two blocks in Mount Tamborine, so overgrown with lantana that I didn't even know I had a view until I propped a ladder against a tree and climbed up,' she recalls. 'The real estate agent recommended I get a goat to control the vegetation.'

'Good clients get good houses,' says Poole. Rawnsley, an artist, had a few stipulations and then left the rest to him. The house had to accommodate a living/dining room, a kitchen, a bedroom and a studio on one level and two more bedrooms, bathroom and laundry on the lower level.

She had a Chinese screen that was to form a pivotal part of the living room; she needed light; and she 'liked the roofline of a hotel in Noosa that Gabriel had designed'. It was to be a very custom-made house to suit Rawnsley's requirements. Rather like Virginia Woolf's _A Room of One's Own_ , this was to be Rawnsley's 'House of Her Own'. She was at a stage of her life where she had to only suit herself.

The sense of structure, where everything is visible and has a purpose, characterises Poole's quadropod architecture. Developed to be portable, there is a transparency of method and honesty of intent. This section shows a guest bedroom on the lower floor.

She doesn't like cooking – the kitchen is small. She wanted seclusion – the house is approached via a bridge accessed through a lockable garage. She wanted an open house with breezes – the house is sited for maximum airflow. 'The site is extremely steep and drops over the edge of the cliff to the floor of the valley some hundreds of metres below, with views to the north-east over the Gold Coast and the Pacific Ocean,' says Poole.

Without the quadropod system, and its reduced footings with only slight disturbance to the site, and the ability of the system to calibrate the platform to get it square, it would have been impossible to build. Poole's brother Simon, a steel fabricator, built the structure to platform level and then a builder friend of Angela Rawnsley took over from that point.

'By this time I was separating quadropods into towers and using the space in between to install staircases,' says Poole. Indeed the internal staircase spans the entire width of this space with Perspex risers providing a lightness and visibility of the terrain below.

The roof, however, is the defining feature of the Gartner House. The cross-section shows the Oriental feel of the sweeping Custom Orb corrugated steel roof that peaks above both the living room and the master bedroom. In each instance the ridge becomes a strip of Perspex, which acts as a light source but also, when viewed internally, enhances the feeling that the roof is afloat. While the interior is refined, the exterior blends with the setting as rough hewn weatherboards and corrugated steel become lost in the tropical rainforest.

Rawnsley remains, to this day, delighted with the house. Once, after a glass of wine, she steeled herself to call Poole and tell him, 'I love this house – it has changed my life.' While the RAIA Gold Medal (which Poole received in 1998) is the ultimate accolade from his peers, Rawnsley's statement must surely be the ultimate accolade from a client.

The complexity of the design of the roof is both beautiful and logical: the pleasing symmetry and the play of convex and concave curves, the elevations and openings are to let light in and water run off.

A beautifully realised drawing by Poole of the Gartner House.

DETAILS THE GARTNER HOUSE

QUADROPOD With this steep and awkward site, the quadropod system was ideal for the substructure as its reduced footings sit lightly on the land. As Rawnsley says, 'It was uncommon to build on a slope, the tendency was to cut into the hill.' Adjustable lightweight steel arms are angled to support the floor framing and can be calibrated to even out height discrepancies and so ensure a stable platform base. In this instance, Poole's brother undertook the work to the base platform stage and another builder, a relative of Rawnsley, took over the work from that point.

KITCHEN Angela Rawnsley commissioned this house at a stage in her life when she felt she didn't have to please anyone but herself. So when it came to specifications for the kitchen, her demands were very clear. She was not interested in cooking, so it could be small and not take up much floor space. Nevertheless, Poole has created a kitchen that feels expansive with its floor-to-ceiling glass doors, which open up to the large deck and face the view. Even if Rawnsley is just putting the kettle on, Poole has ensured there is pleasure to be had in the experience.

BEDROOM  When Rawnsley first bought the two blocks of land, she had to prop a ladder against a tree and climb up to discover that she had a view: uninterrupted rainforest for miles with the contrast of the tower blocks of the Gold Coast on the horizon. Rawnsley's bedroom sits in the second of the elevated pavilions with her bed facing the view. The house is sited to capture cooling breezes, meaning there is no need for air conditioning despite the humid temperatures.

STAIRCASE At the centre of the building is a core, to which each pavilion is anchored and which houses the wide stairwell. This is a development from previous quadropod houses such as the Gloster House, which had an external staircase. With transparency and lightness the overriding goal, Poole chose to pair the timber treads with Perspex risers. This ensures the floor of the site is visible, as is the signature Poole quadropod structural system. Rawnsley, who has gathered art, ceramics and artefacts during her years in the house, makes good use of the breadth of the stairs to showcase her various collections.

ORIENTAL SCREEN The Chinese screen that Angela Rawnsley's ex-husband bought her was pivotal to the design of the house. From an exterior perspective she was excited by the opportunity of a sweeping roof, and from an interior perspective, the screen was important. Poole married both these requests with a main room that has stability and symmetry, using the screen as a linking element between the floor plane and the dramatically soaring roofline. As an artist, the level of natural light was important to Rawnsley and the channel of Perspex that runs the length of the two main rooms ensures maximum natural light.

GARAGE  One of Rawnsley's stipulations was that the house be made secure, which Poole achieved by positioning it deep into the site, away from the road, and designing a logical plan that ensured safe entry. Access to the house is through the garage (also designed with a sloping roof) and across a covered walkway to the front door. The dense rainforest surrounding the bridge, and its elevated nature, creates a sense of arrival. It also gives the house a feeling of separation and seclusion that very much suits Rawnsley's artistic personality.
1990–1994 THE GOTTLIEB HOUSE
WOOD MARSH

The Gottlieb House is an exercise in abstract forms and geometric shapes, its impassive concrete and glass façade giving nothing away to the street.

The atrium echoes the exterior in form and materiality. The light from the skylight illuminates the space and changes mood with the time of day and the seasons.

'THE GAME HERE IS ONE OF GEOMETRIC FORMS. AN ELLIPTICAL RAW CONCRETE DRUM, A GLASS CUBE, A SLAB OF CONCRETE RESTING ON PARALLEL CONCRETE WALLS. EACH PRECISELY ARRANGED, THE COMPOSITION A STUDY IN SCULPTURAL ABSTRACTION. THIS IS STARK ARCHITECTURE; OUTWARDLY UNWELCOMING AND IMPENETRABLE. THERE ARE NO WINDOWS TO THE STREET.'JOE ROLLO, _CONCRETE POETRY_

The entrance to the house is through a large scale steel door with the glass cube hovering overhead.

The sweep of the staircase leads up to the parents' quarters – the large ensuite, housed in the glass cube, and the elliptical bedroom beyond. The fact that neither has any doors is the thing that the Gottliebs' friends find the most confronting. The steel balustrade was the last element in the house to be designed and was bolted into place in two large sections.

WHEN ROGER WOOD MENTIONS, IN PASSING, THE de Chirico-esque nature of the Gottlieb House, it makes immediate sense. As architects who draw on the art world for inspiration, rather than that of their own profession past or present, the reference is entirely appropriate given the Surrealist master's penchant for enigmatic architectural vistas, often including a featureless tower. 'The lack of immediate legibility leads to uncertainty about scale and refutes domesticity,' says Wood.

The brief the Gottliebs gave the architects included but a few mandatory requests, of which anonymity was primary. 'Be big and don't give anything away from the street, they said, and beyond that they left it to us,' says Marsh. Set on a flat block in the Melbourne suburb of Caulfield, the house is surrounded by a stylistic mixed bag of inter-war homes. 'Suburban subdivisions are something we grew up with but we always think they need challenging,' says Wood. 'When applying for a planning permit for this, the council said that we had to address the context that we were building in. So I looked at the context and said to the planner that I thought it was somewhere between Tel Aviv and a James Bond film.'

With its austere monumentality and refusal to give any clues of domesticity, it is no wonder that during construction neighbours thought the Gottlieb House was a new squash court or a mini-power station. As pointed out in the ABC television series _In the Mind of the Architect_ , the house was indeed 'thumbing its concrete nose at convention'.

Both Roger Wood and Randal Marsh graduated from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). After a brief spell working in other architectural firms, they established Biltmoderne with Dale Jones-Evans in 1983 and together designed the Choong House in Eltham (1985–87). It was radical in its design, won the 1987 RAIA Merit Award for Outstanding Architecture, Residential (New), and Wood comments it contains certain core themes that have remained in their work over their 25 years of practice. 'The idea of converging blank walls to a door or an opening is something we are still doing in our most recent house, and in the Port Phillip [Estate] Winery.'

Even earlier, though, in 1985 Biltmoderne had won the RAIA Merit Award for Outstanding Architecture, Commercial (New), with their project for Inflation Nightclub. For a period in the Eighties, they were the architects to go to if you wanted a cutting-edge nightclub design, and they worked on a series of spaces – Subterrain, Chasers and The Metro in Melbourne. They exploited theatricality through use of sets and lighting – both natural and staged – and were at pains to avoid 'evenness' in their work by embracing the movement through dark to light, and managing the flux of space and form. This was a fertile and inventive period when they were also designing furniture, theatre sets, installations and interiors. In 1984 they designed the film studio, McCrae and Way, in South Melbourne and it was here, in 1987, that Joe and Pesa Gottlieb, while visiting, first saw their work.

'It was such a strong, honest structure with a great use of space,' says Pesa. 'There wasn't a square room yet everything worked. Joe only ever saw the façade but it was enough to convince him.'

To the left of the entrance, a guest bathroom and study are tucked behind a curved, roughcast render wall.

Prior to the Gottliebs, Wood Marsh had designed a string of houses on suburban sites around Melbourne. The most notable was the Kyritsis House (1988), in Eaglemont, in which geometry, weight and abstraction were the defining elements. 'It's part of a body of work that deals with perspective and composition,' says Marsh. 'The basic form is made from two tapered blocks on the ground floor and a third bridging block.' It presents a somewhat daunting façade, not only in its dense sculptural form, but also in its cladding materials: bluestone tiles and roughly textured cement render. Graham Jahn in his book _Contemporary Australian Architecture_ observes, 'the simple heavy massing"stands defiantly against the "lightweight"conception of modernism as the product of minimal frames, floating planes and transparent walls. This building avoids such delicacy, preferring instead substantiality.'

Key for the Gottlieb House was the sense that Wood Marsh had moved beyond what they termed as the 'standard domestic configuration' and were primed to take their thinking to the next step. Pesa Gottlieb acknowledges they were naïve about the process. 'We just picked up the phone and said that we would like them to design a house for us. It was that simple.' Wood Marsh, who had set up their own practice in 1987, were delighted. 'We were commissioned in November 1989 and by January 1990 there was a recession looming,' says Marsh. 'It was our first really big budget house, a full-on commission with clients who seemed to be up for anything. It was perfect.'

The study space, with table and chairs designed by Wood Marsh, makes a connection with the garden through large floor-to-ceiling windows.

As well as privacy, the Gottliebs, who had three boys, had a few other stipulations that allowed the project to flourish. They wanted an entertaining area big enough to invite 350 guests to their eldest son's bar mitzvah, four bedrooms and a low maintenance solution. 'We were young when we were doing the house and, fortunately, at the time we could afford it,' says Joe Gottlieb. 'Everything they described during the design process was built exactly as promised and without compromise.'

It became Wood Marsh's first 'complete' building, with a sense of unity throughout. 'The materiality of the building is exactly the same internally as externally,' says Wood. Externally, it presents as a massive elliptical concrete drum with a silvery, gridded glass box grafted onto the façade. Right from the outset a dynamic is set up. The concrete form is industrial and massive while the light-reflecting glass box (which Wood Marsh liken to a flash bulb) that protrudes over the large stainless steel front door is a finer, more precisely engineered aspect of the composition. To the street it feels challenging and monolithic, especially in the setting of the surrounding Brady Bunch–style houses. 'We are keen that our buildings aren't defined [from the exterior] as a house or art gallery or restaurant. It is a theme that runs through our work,' says Wood.

To step inside is an awe-inspiring experience – something normally achieved in public or religious spaces rather than domestic settings. 'The theatrical quality of the work is to do with our understanding of scale and how people react to it,' says Wood.

The elliptical drum in raw concrete forms the atrium. To the right, a soaring curved staircase (its shape emphasised by a custom-made stainless steel handrail) leads to the main bedroom and ensuite. Cut into the ceiling is a circular skylight throwing an ovoid of sunlight by day, moonlight by night, into the heroically spare interior. To the left, a roughly rendered curved wall conceals a small guest bathroom and study space beyond. This area echoes the curve of the bedroom above, with the two levels sharing lights – what forms a ceiling light in the study becomes a floor light above.

The huge entertaining space has a museum-like quality yet its relationship to the north-facing garden enlivens the space. Materiality is used to denote the structural elements of the house: the roughly rendered section in the ceiling, broken in three by slices of glazing, with each denoting one of the bedrooms above.

From the atrium, 'you can see there is a spine, albeit curved and twisted, that runs through from the front door to the slice of green in the garden at the rear of the property', says Marsh. 'It clearly illustrates the transition through the space.' The atrium leads directly to an enormous (20 x 10 m) rectilinear living and dining space. It is essentially a monochromatic but soft, light-absorbing interior – pale green onyx crushed into the terrazzo flooring gives the impression of scattered autumn leaves, while gold fabric-covered sofas (that Wood Marsh designed specifically for the house) and the artworks the architects chose ease the restricted material palette.

The Wood Marsh–designed dining table and chairs are at the far end of the room adjacent to the stacked slate wall. The thick, textured wall and rise in level indicate the move from the public space to the more intimate family living area.

Animating this large space are slices of light, dragged into the building as the sun moves across the north-facing long elevation. The ever-changing light effects, and the connection to nature between house and garden, continue to delight the owners.

The transition to the family living area from the more formal space is made by an artificial rise in level and a move through a corridor of charcoal-coloured stacked slate. A series of textural, visual and scale cues throughout the house mark the move from public to private space. 'The family living area and bedrooms are compressed in scale, they have lower ceilings and hence are more intimate,' says Wood.

The house is circulatory in nature, with stairs, of markedly different character, at either end. From a door in the family room, its walls painted dark charcoal to create a sense of enclosure, the stairs lead up to the boys' bedrooms and bathroom, another seating area and a corridor to the parents' quarters.

From there, a left turn takes you to the curved staircase leading down to the atrium entrance. This sense of the circulatory is literal but Wood explains that the sculptural form means that, from any given point, there are different views, with the layering of sequential forms, of external and internal vistas, of the interplay of the light and textures within the building. It is a house that is both serene and, paradoxically, without a dull moment.

'Early on our investigations into geometry were to do with getting away from the rectilinear, the obvious corner and the flat elevation,' he says. 'The ideas that inspire us are often about not seeing everything at once but requiring the viewer to move around, like one would a sculpture, in order to understand it fully.'

As with many groundbreaking aspects of the design there was the challenge of finding the right tradespeople for the slate walls, the formwork and the glass work on the box. Joe Gottlieb recalls that the recession meant few on the team, including the architects, had other jobs at the time, and so the house received a rare level of attention to detail. As Joe Rollo commented in his book _Concrete Poetry_ , 'There is a kind of rigour in design in this house you seldom come across in residential architecture. All has been considered, every opportunity has been explored and you are left with the impression that no detail has been left unexamined.' It is bespoke in every sense of the word.

Wood and Marsh are both design architects, and when asked if the design scheme came easily Marsh is unequivocal. 'It did, because all our work is an ongoing dialogue about design, so nothing is ever laboured.'

'We did, however, have some debate around the kitchen as neither had used one in their lives,' recalls Pesa. The result, however, is generous in cupboard space and working surfaces with angled windows providing views to the side of the house.

With three boys in the family, robustness was paramount, and the architects recall, with a degree of pride, the time they visited to find a basketball hoop had been installed in the main space, not to mention the bar mitzvah for which the entertaining area was designed – not only were there two punk bands and a bar but guests exceeded the 400 mark. In the 17 years since it was completed, the only maintenance has been to paint the ceiling in the kitchen and family rooms.

The patina the house gains as the years go by is viewed by Pesa and Joe as adding to its character, but its fundamental solidity, level of craftsmanship and forward-thinking design mean that it has neither dated nor decayed.

The main ensuite is a case in point. Located in the glass box that spans inside and out, it has a rare combination of drama and taste. An expanse of leaf-cut marble forms the back wall, a circular skylight creates a moving light source and the elegant stainless steel wall cabinets nod to the industrial. The shower sits above a magnificent marble trough, which was designed to double as a bath (but was never used that way), and mirrored walls provide endless reflections. It is a bathroom that has endured both stylistically and functionally.

The adjoining bedroom, with its raw concrete interior, has been given a touch of luxury with an over-scale padded bedhead, designed by Wood Marsh, which accommodates drawers accessed from the other side of the wall, and subdued lighting from a series of floor lights around the perimeter of the room.

Pesa Gottlieb admits that recently her friends have begun to tell her they now understand what she and Joe were doing back then, and neighbours no longer approach them with paint charts making helpful suggestions for exterior colours.

'In the beginning we were such a focus of attention,' she says. 'I was making coffee one morning, not long after the house was finished, and there were five men in black suits standing in the garden. Ignore them they are architects, Roger assured me.'

The terrazzo flooring from the main room continues into the dining, living and kitchen areas. This space is glazed to the north and east, with the kitchen located through the stacked slate wall.

The view along the long north-facing side of the house shows how the first floor bedrooms sit over the main entertaining area and how it links to the drum form at the front of the house.

Just as you cannot judge a book by its cover, you clearly cannot judge a house by its façade. Industrial, forbidding and intriguing to the street it may be, but inside there is beauty, joy, art, connection to nature, to light and the changing seasons. It is a robust family space that takes entertaining in its stride and is undaunted by a basketball game or a bucks night. It is another example of Gabriel Poole's maxim that clients get the houses they deserve, and maybe the serendipity of architects finding the clients they, in turn, deserve.

Wood Marsh challenged the notion of suburban architecture with the Gottlieb House; it provided a base for later work, both commercial and residential, and as such is pivotal. Their first large urban design project, the Eastern Freeway, owes a debt to the Gottlieb House in its use of concrete walls, and the later warehouse conversion, the Taylor House (1997), employs the same restricted (and non-domestic) palette and materiality and has a similar sense of the unexpected.

Through their remarkable partnership, Wood Marsh have been able to shape the city of Melbourne with groundbreaking projects, from The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) (1996–2002), a structure in Cor-ten steel that is as much sculptural object as building, to Yve (2007), a building of such sinuous curves it redefines the words 'apartment block'. While they do not chase awards, the foyer of their office is running out of wall space to accommodate the number of framed certificates. As self-described mid-career architects with a long way to go, they had better nominate another space.

The bathroom mixes the luxurious and industrial: leaf-cut marble, terrazzo, glass, mirror and stainless steel.

Bedhead in the master bedroom conceals drawers, accessed from the dressing room behind. The floor lighting, lower left, doubles with ceiling lighting in the room below.

DETAILS THE GOTTLIEB HOUSE

HANDRAIL The atrium carries immense visual power because it remains totally unadorned; the architectural elements of raw, curved concrete, sweeping staircase and circular skylight creating the spare structure. Hence, both aesthetically and practically, the balustrade is significant. While it was budgeted for, it was the only element not resolved at the outset of the project. Wood Marsh waited until they saw the volume before coming up with the stainless steel design. Templates were made and it was built off-site. It was then delivered in two extraordinarily heavy pieces, which were bolted on. To this day, the architects marvel that it all fitted with such precision.

SLICES OF GLAZING The use of glazing in the house is key to its connection to nature – both visually in terms of the sense of greenery from the garden, and in the way the sunlight is used to animate the interior space. The mass of roughcast render and concrete posts contrast with the lightness and transparency of the glass. Compositionally the forms are very well articulated internally with the shape of the bedrooms above clearly delineated in the rendered sections in the ceiling. The slice of glazing that separates these areas becomes a glass wrap-over that has the dual function of providing a natural light source and linking the two levels of the building.

KITCHEN  The kitchen is part of the family living area and, as such, the scale of this zone becomes more intimate, with lower ceilings and rooms of more domestic dimensions. There are few walls in this space and, while the kitchen is a separate room, there is a large opening in the stacked slate wall linking it to the dining and living area. Wood Marsh designed all the joinery to look like freestanding pieces of furniture. With the brief of no maintenance in mind, the kitchen cupboards had sheets of stainless steel folded and welded onto the doors. The Gottliebs' only task in 17 years has been to repaint the kitchen ceiling once.

LIGHT FITTINGS There is not a centralised light source in this house, and there are some ingenious ways in which this has been avoided. The study to the left of the entrance sits directly below the master bedroom, and Wood Marsh designed light fittings that would function as ceiling lights in the study and perform double duty, acting as floor lights in the bedroom above. The soft ambient glow of these lights in the bedroom is something that the Gottliebs appreciate but friends complain that it is too dim. 'Regrettably, people sometimes want their houses to be lit like a 7/11,' says Marsh.

GLASS BOX This house is full of 'firsts' for tradesmen unaccustomed to what was asked of them by the architects. The house holds a sense of experimentation in terms of what could be done, and no more so than with the glass box that interrupts the concrete façade. The box holds the ensuite in the parents' quarters and spans the interior and exterior of the building. Wood Marsh approached the glass manufacturer with the brief of creating the effect of the inside of a flashbulb by combining mirror and textured glass. The panels are housed in the grid of stainless steel and have weathered remarkably well.

FURNITURE  The Gottliebs asked Wood Marsh what they should do with their old furniture and the answer, unequivocally, was to throw it out, as the architects would design everything they needed. As a result, not only were the fitted elements custom made but the tables, dining chairs, sofas and ottomans were designed to the architects' specifications. The gold and pale blue of the upholstered pieces lightens the room and their dimensions fill the space to exactly the right degree. Wood Marsh also specified artworks, giving the Gottliebs the ultimate bespoke interior.
1995 THE MOOLOOMBA HOUSE
ANDRESEN O'GORMAN

The easterly, long side, with outdoor staircase leading to the belvedere and the north-facing ocean view, embraces a garden of banksia and fish fern.

The fine timber battens that characterise the house and create a shifting pattern of shadows throughout the day are set against corrugated acrylic.

'WITH ITS BELVEDERE SEEMING TO HANG IN THE TREETOPS, INVITING BOTH THE BREEZE AND THE OCEAN, THE HOUSE IS ESSENTIALLY A LANDSCAPE PAVILION CLOSER TO A JAPANESE MOON VIEWING PLATFORM THAN A SUBURBAN COTTAGE.'PETER TONKIN, ARCHITECT

The entrance to the house shows how the walkway was constructed around the tree.

The sand courtyard sits between the more enclosed 'cave' room and the double-height living and dining area. The design combines regular rhythmic patterns with the seemingly random.

BRIT ANDRESEN'S REPUTATION PRECEDES HER. Long before I have the opportunity to interview her, I hear only good things from peers and students alike. Glenn Murcutt admired her work; Timothy Hill of Donovan Hill had been inspired by her teaching and had worked with her on the property adjacent to the Mooloomba House; even friends who have simply toured the Highgate Hill House in Brisbane enthused. Despite a relatively small body of work, Brit Andresen and her late husband, Peter O'Gorman, garnered international attention and in 2002 she received the RAIA Gold Medal (the highest award in Australian architecture), the first time it had been awarded to a woman. Her acceptance was coupled with sadness as O'Gorman had only recently died and all of their work, both academic and design projects, were the result of collaborative thought. 'We would keep looking, keep thinking, keep talking – these are the ways of sharing insights. It wasn't planned, it was just driven by one another's interest and conversation about architecture,' Andresen says of their partnership, which spanned more than 25 years.

The house they designed and built together is a summary of many of their shared philosophies and how, as Andresen noted, 'by engaging in poetic abstraction as well as the pragmatic', they created a building where 'inside–outside boundaries become eroded and illusive, forming rooms, alcoves and a belvedere which are both inside and out'.

The narrow walkway above the kitchen is used to access the 'bed boxes', the small enclosed bed spaces.

North Stradbroke Island, off the south-eastern coast of Queensland, a longstanding Aboriginal settlement, was thought mistakenly by Captain Cook to have been the east coast of Australia. There are three townships on North Stradbroke island – Dunwich, Amity Point and Point Lookout, a tourist destination on the surf side of the island where whale watching is a holiday pastime.

Andresen and O'Gorman bought land in Point Lookout in 1985. 'It has always been a tightly-held area,' says Andresen. 'We might have preferred to be further from neighbours and the road, but this was a north-facing block and that's so difficult to find.'

Sitting at a table in the nest-like belvedere looking out to sea, Andresen explains the thinking behind the house and the long journey both geographically and intellectually to get to this point.

While born to Norwegian parents in the small town of Sandnes, she has little memory of it. From five until she left home at 17, after her school Leaving Certificate, she had an Australian upbringing. Her father, an engineer who initially worked on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, brought his family out by boat in 1951. They moved around, but Andresen's teenage years were spent in Sydney, and she went to Hornsby Girls' High School. 'Some of the strongest feelings and love of the landscape come from growing up on the North Shore, because at that time you could walk out the back door and into a gully of native bushland,' she says.

At 17 she travelled to England via the United States. 'I remember being intrigued by buildings such as the newly built Eero Saarinen's airport terminal in Washington, DC.' However, at that time, her primary interest was in biological sciences and art but, encouraged by a wonderful high school teacher, Barry Fulton, she developed an interest in seeing and thinking about the physical environment, and an ability to trust her own judgment. She did, though, find the models and drawings of architecture student friends curiously engaging, and by the time she had received her exam results was ready to apply to (and be accepted by) the Architectural Association in London.

At the time her father had accepted a post in India and her parents were keen for her to move back to Norway for her tertiary education. Andresen attended NTH Trondheim where she qualified as a _Sivil Arkitekt_ in 1969. 'My Norwegian was of the 200–word variety when I arrived, but I could pick up the language easily enough,' she says. 'What was more difficult, initially, were the cultural nuances.'

Educationally, she was exposed to areas of interest that have stayed with her to this day. 'I loved learning about architecture from the beginning. I just soaked it up,' she says. 'We studied the history of timber buildings in Norway, some of which were over 1000 years old. Learning about history was another way of making up for not having the Norwegian cultural experience.'

It was also a time of rich and varied influence. Visiting lecturers and part-time teachers from the UK, America, Sweden and Finland came to Trondheim, and students travelled in small groups to Milan and Rome. 'We looked at Italian streetscapes – which were so different from those in Scandinavia – the way streets were furnished by architecture, and the ways in which people used public space,' Andresen recalls.

A Dutch–Norwegian scholarship to explore alternative approaches to multiple housing involved a move to Holland, shortly followed by an invitation from John Hix (who had been a visiting teacher in Trondheim) to go to Cambridge University to participate in an event and studio teaching at the school of architecture.

At Cambridge she met Barry Gasson, also a part-time lecturer, and together they put forward a competition submission for the prestigious Burrell Museum in Glasgow. 'The brief was beautifully put together and it was exciting to work on,' says Andresen. 'But none of us expected to go through to the short list.' When they did, they involved John Meunier (Gasson's partner in their joint architectural practice) to assist in the development of the project. It was a momentous achievement to win the competition in 1972.

The first half of the 1970s was a fulfilling time for Andresen – teaching in Cambridge and at the Architectural Association, and travelling to Glasgow to develop the plans for one of the most exciting public works in Britain at the time. Then, in 1976, came an economic downturn, and the museum project was shelved. Colleagues began looking for jobs overseas and one friend drew her attention to a teaching job at the University of Queensland.

'I had an interview in London and I remember the interviewers, who were English, all but dissuading me from going, implying that I would be better off staying in the UK.'

Combining ingenuity and economy, the table top sits on a base of legs fashioned from clay pipes. The roof and western wall are made from corrugated acrylic, enhancing the sense of transparency.

The geometry of the batten arrangement, as the camera looks skyward, contrasts with the locally grown cypress poles still clad in their rough bark.

Floor plans showing the lower and upper floors illustrate the way in which outdoor space is folded into the building envelope.

Undeterred, in early 1977 she drove across the New South Wales border into Queensland and was struck by the beauty of the timber Queenslanders. 'These timber houses with their big roofs and wide verandahs, with filigree and batten work were so different from Sydney houses and I imagined that the architecture school must be housed in one of these,' she recalls. Andresen was, however, surprised to discover the school in a concrete structure not unlike those she had left behind in England.

When she arrived, there were no women teaching there, but a growing number of female students. Undaunted, she set about plugging the gaps as she saw fit. 'I did a lot to try to increase student expectations in the first few years. I saw that students didn't assemble work in portfolios, didn't hold an end-of-year exhibition or have an exhibition space or produce an end-of-year publication,' says Andresen. 'I was fortunate to find interested students and colleagues who collaborated on these initiatives.'

Peter O'Gorman, who was keen for the school to move forward in the same way, was one of the first people Andresen was introduced to, when the head of the department suggested they might like to work together in the first semester. It signalled the beginning of a long and fruitful partnership in both life and work.

After doing some building work with his uncles during his teenage years, Peter O'Gorman, Brisbane born and bred, had decided that, while he enjoyed the building process, his real interest was in learning to design buildings. He enrolled in Industrial High in Brisbane because it taught geometrical drawing, then a requirement for entry to the architecture course at the University of Queensland, in which he enrolled in 1958.

On graduating, he won the A.E. Brookes Travelling Scholarship that took him on an eye-opening trip in the mid-Sixties, to compare the organic growth of Greek villages with the Danish model of planned social housing. The rest of Europe followed, through Denmark and Finland into Russia, across Siberia and to Japan, before returning home.

'Travelling overseas became an important source of ideas and learning about architecture,' says Andresen. 'You can't really know enough about a building or public space from a book – you have to experience places and see them in their wider context. Travelling informed our teaching, research and our work together.'

Their first joint project was an extension to a small cottage in New South Wales. 'It wasn't so much the idea that we would form a practice – we just started designing together and our practice evolved,' says Andresen.

By the time they worked on the Deer Park, a tourist lodge, they had known one another for three years and found it interesting to work on a non-residential scheme with its very different challenges. 'Peter taught me to design with the local hardwood, a material that the local carpenters know how to handle. We both studied American Arts and Crafts architect Bernard Maybeck – we enjoyed his sense of humour – and so thought we could raise a smile with shaping the ends of beams as abstracted animal heads to decorate the Deer Park hunting lodge.'

Their residential commissions have been described by Philip Goad as a 'laboratory for three things: refining the use of Australian hardwood as a building material; the use of mathematical proportions and harmonic series as ordering devices; the constant search for an appropriate creation and definition of space'. All three find full expression in the Mooloomba House. They had bought the land more than 10 years earlier but as they didn't have the funds to build, they even contemplated selling at one point. O'Gorman felt the only way to get on with it was to take a year of unpaid leave, use the little savings they had, make a start and make something small. The other persuasive factor was that Graham Mellor, a trusted joiner and carpenter they had worked with for many years, was available. 'Graham understands what is involved in making a house where the construction is made fully visible,' says Andresen.

Andresen admits that the narrowness of the corridor would not suit everyone but this was a house built by themselves, for themselves. The simple 'bed box' is in keeping with the easy lifestyle of a holiday house.

They debated having elements built on the mainland and sent across, but Mellor did not want to tackle the logistics in that way. He preferred the control of working on site, and therefore the design had to work well within the construction skill set and the tools available. Glass for the double-height windows, for example, came in sections and were joined with lead came, doors were made on site rather than in a factory and appliances kept small so that they could fit in the car if they needed repair.

The house is remarkable. It sets out to satisfy the basic human needs of shelter: sleeping, cooking, bathing and relaxing, but finds solutions that are intuitive in satisfying the soul as well as the body. 'Peter and I often talked about the human appetite. Humans like sweet things but not all the time; we like salt, but it is unbearable in huge quantities. It is the same when things are just too utilitarian. It doesn't fully satisfy the appetite. The utilitarian gives answers but the poetic creates wonder, and architecture involves the inclusion of these two, often competing, qualities.'

Because Andresen believes that architecture is experienced mostly below the level of consciousness, the Mooloomba House introduces design with many opposites: enclosure and openness; rhythms of regular geometry set against the seemingly random; rough untreated bark contrasted with smooth planed and pigment-stained boards; standard issue and custom made; transparency and solidity. All are held together in a balance in which each underscores the significance of the other.

There is a sense that every aspect of the house has been deeply considered, assumptions about what a house should be have been questioned, and solutions expressed honestly and directly.

The louvred windows in the bedrooms ensure through breezes.

Its siting defies the norm of directing the focus of a building towards the view. This structure lies along the western boundary with 'floating' platforms and walkways wrapping around the garden of banksia trees and fish fern to the east. It is only when one takes the external staircase to the belvedere that the ocean view is apparent.

Philip Goad describes the house as 'a long inhabited "wall"with two permanent "tents"attached', and indeed the climate permits the house to be formed by a series of screens and 18 mm–thick ply. It is a complex house to describe and yet a simple one to understand when one is there. It consists of two primary rooms visually linked across a sand courtyard – one a small 'winter' room and the most conventional in the house, with plasterboard internally and fibre cement sheeting externally to 'create a room that is more sheltered and cave-like', according to Andresen.

The structure surrounding the banksia court is made as an open timber framework with some areas enclosed by marine ply sheeting (2100 x 1200 mm) trimmed to achieve the pleasing proportions of the Golden Mean. Inside, the supports are locally sourced cypress poles, stripped of bark to give a smooth appearance but maintaining all the character of a tree trunk. These are mirrored by the poles in the sand courtyard, but in this external space they retain their bark.

The primary and secondary frame of the house is revealed throughout and is its most expressive component. Externally, around the courtyard, the visual rhythm of the frame is more or less regular, at 600 mm, 1200 mm and 2400 mm spacing.

Staining with pigmented eucalyptus oil brings clarity and unity to the structure and enables the eye to register the line work of the timber framing painted black. Inside, the play of geometry is very different. While seemingly random, it is in parts based on the Fibonacci sequence and creates its own visual dynamism. It is this balance of relationships between competing factors – visual complexity with order – that Andresen believes contributes to the richness of the building. She acknowledges that with design, 'sometimes intentions are pre-planned and sometimes kept open to take advantage of opportunities'. Something that might be required for utilitarian reasons can present an opportunity to extend a poetic resonance. The battens around the belvedere are regular and functional, but weave into them sections of timber and you have a metaphor for a nest or basket and the experience is subtly transformed.

The design choreographs with scale – narrow doorways and the galley walkway at bedroom level (only 600 mm wide) and four enclosed 'bed boxes' contrast with the double-height living area. The belvedere, looking out to a wide view, is a small, tight space and this experience of containment is something that Andresen and O'Gorman liked to explore. 'So much of our childhood imaginings take place under a table or in a "little house"and there is a lot written about the way those imaginings can carry poetics into later life,' she says. 'So we liked the idea of sleeping in a small space, a kind of tree house. Or this belvedere – it could lose these associations if it were large.'

The belvedere, from which the ocean can be seen as well as the moon and stars, is accessed via an external timber staircase. The intricacy of the timber work and its seeming fragility make this distinctive area of the house a key to its fit with the natural environment.

There were several ways in which the economy of construction was addressed. The house is small, 65 square metres, in terms of internal space, but the ways in which external areas have been appropriated and the selective use of enclosure make it seem much larger. Costs were contained by keeping bathroom and kitchen elements to a minimum, and using standard ply sheeting and corrugated acrylic roofing (used as a wall in the main room) for the single skin structure, alongside locally sourced cypress poles. Wastage was also minimised and 'when we ran out of money we would simply stop work until we had more and could move on to the next stage', says Andresen.

The fact that they were their own client meant that they 'knew the kind of things we enjoyed, just simple things, and the fact that it was a holiday house brought freedom and a sense of adventure', she says.

One of the most beautiful things about the house is the changing play of light throughout the day, as it passes through battens and corrugated acrylic. At times it is soft and diffuse, at others it takes on the geometry of a Bridget Riley painting. The sense of transparency communicates itself through light and breezes plus the ability to move through internal/external space both visually and physically with the greatest of ease.

The house has been likened to a sixteenth century Japanese tea house and certainly there is an unadorned purity and simplicity achieved through deep thought and architectural understanding. But where the real strength lies is in its humanity, its ability to tune into the fundamentals of experience and to, in turn, delight.

Peter Tonkin and Ellen Woolley, in Peter O'Gorman's obituary in _Architecture Australia_ magazine, wrote that 'while his built work was never ordinary it celebrated ordinary values of (apparent but hard won) simplicity of comfort and humanity'. The Mooloomba House is testament to this most fundamental of truths.

The belvedere, as seen from the east through the native garden. The honesty of the materials and the way in which they are expressed is evident here and above.

The space is intentionally confined, and the sense of a nest enhanced by the use of woven timbers in the balustrade.

DETAILS THE MOOLOOMBA HOUSE

INTERIOR SPACE Although small in area, the expansive, double-height living space holds the weight and type of timbers in a sensitive balance. The westerly wall combines the use of fine timber battens against a background of corrugated acrylic. The changing light effects, as the sun moves around the building, create something of a kinetic artwork in the sparely decorated space. The locally sourced cypress pole has been stripped (externally, in the courtyard, they maintain their bark) and provides one of many striking counterpoints – the contrast of the raw with the geometry of the manmade.

TIMBER CONSTRUCTION Timber construction, in general, and the use of Australian hardwoods, in particular, defines this house. Peter O'Gorman had worked with eucalypt over the years and was well aware of its shortcomings as well as the enormous benefits it had as a building material. Working with green structural timber, he developed a system to overcome its tendency to warp, cup and split as it dried after construction. To keep hardwood posts straight, each post is cut in two lengthways and then fixed together with the timber's grain positioned in opposing directions.

THE BELVEDERE  In a world where large, wide verandahs face ocean views, Andresen O'Gorman consciously created a small, contained space, which doesn't spill from the living room, but rather is accessed via an external staircase. To go there is a conscious act. The subtle intensity of their thinking is illustrated by the construction of the balustrade. A purely utility-driven solution would have the battens forming a simple rectangle – it is the decision to weave in sections of timber at certain points throughout the enclosure that brings about the suggestion of occupying a nest or basket. It takes on a poetic resonance by this simple addition.

SIZE MATTERS While inventiveness of thought was limitless, the budget was not so, and many solutions are the result of economy that a beach house allows. One such practicality was to keep the kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms as compact as possible. The kitchen, which is open to the dining/living space, illustrates the importance of resolving the construction, as all the workings of the house are fully visible, from the primary frame structure to the shelving and benches. Bedrooms are replaced by 'bed boxes', accessed via the upper level walkway, as Andresen and O'Gorman preferred sleeping in small raised spaces overlooking the banksia grove.

STAIRCASE Initially, there was a notion that the house could be pre-fabricated on the mainland, but carpenter and joiner Graham Mellor preferred the control of working on site. The level of craftsmanship is shown in the raised belvedere and this exterior staircase that leads from the lower decks to the viewing platform overlooking the ocean. The simple, measured design evokes a Japanese love of craft through the narrowness of the staircase and the depth of each stair tread.

WINTER ROOM  While the majority of the house is of open, light, single-skin construction, there is one room dedicated to the seasonal change and to lower temperatures. This is perhaps the most conventional area of the house with its hearth and smoothly painted plasterboard walls. It is, however, not conventional to look into a sand courtyard and to have the bare trunks of trees as supporting poles. Andresen refers to the sense of a 'cave' in this space as opposed to the 'bower' space of the living room and belvedere. It is a house with a relatively small proportion of dedicated indoor floor area (65 m2), but gives the illusion of space through appropriating the outdoors.
1996–1997 THE DROGA APARTMENT
DURBACH BLOCK

As owner Daniel Droga points out, the apartment sits like a sculpture on a brick plinth. This perspective exemplifies Durbach Block's ability to make buildings 'fit' and enhance the existing urbanscape.

'THE FORM OF THE PENTHOUSE IS INTENTIONALLY MUTE AND SCULPTURAL, A TOUGH RESPONSE IN A TOUGH NEIGHBOURHOOD. THIS MUSCULAR EXTERIOR BELIES THE SMOOTH, CALM AND ELASTIC INTERIOR, A DISTINCTIVE MIX OF URBAN IMMERSION AND OVERVIEW.' DURBACH BLOCK ARCHITECTS

The meeting of the original brick wall of the adjacent building and the sweep of the zinc cladding illustrates the successful dynamic of the pairing.

Both Durbach and Block voiced their appreciation of this perspective, which simultaneously takes in the exterior city view and the main sweep of the room, bisected by the powerful curve of the wall.

THE GENESIS OF ANY ARCHITECTURAL PROJECT is interesting and none more so than that of the Droga Apartment. Sometimes the client knows the architect by reputation, is a friend of a friend, or has seen a particular work that has stirred excitement. The Droga Apartment is the result of a series of events that make it a wonder it ever happened at all, let alone with the multi-award-winning outcome it has enjoyed.

Camilla Block happened to be travelling with her sister in India (visiting Le Corbusier and Kahn projects in Ahmedabad) near where Daniel and Lyndell Droga were getting married. Camilla ended up with an invitation to the wedding and, during a conversation, Droga mentioned that he found it awkward dealing with the architects he had shortlisted to undertake a warehouse conversion in Sydney's Surry Hills. Camilla defended the profession, pointing out that one wants an architect to be slightly antisocial, to devote time to mulling things over rather than putting their energies into being highly personable. Droga, impressed by her directness, engaged Durbach Block for the project. 'When I saw their work, particularly the Einfeld Apartment, the connection was immediate,' he says.

'Daniel was the first client to walk into our office and say he wanted a contemporary building,' says Block. 'Neil [Durbach] and I had been working together for five years, and this project solidified our working relationship, it gave us a name together and was the first building published under Durbach Block.'

It also won both the Wilkinson and the Robin Boyd awards for residential architecture, scooping, respectively, the state and national prizes in 1997.

Both Durbach and Block have roots in South Africa. While Block was educated in Australia and returned to South Africa for two working years during her architecture degree, Durbach was educated in Cape Town, and his philosophy shaped by his time there.

While some architects are born to the profession, others have a road to Damascus moment when confronted with something truly great. This moment illuminates, with great intensity, the power of architecture. It also has the ability to transform a passive interest in the subject into a passion. Such was the case with Neil Durbach.

Durbach was something of a self-confessed dilettante, who decided early in life, because of his great facility for drawing, to be an artist. 'My mother wanted me to be a doctor, or at least study law, but I liked the look of the architectural set with their sports cars and leather jackets,' he says. He is honest in admitting that architecture was more of a lifestyle choice than a calling.

View from the mezzanine level shows curved walls echoing one another, and steel posts and beams, emphasising the building's origins.

After a schooling he describes as akin to a military camp, university was a liberating experience. Study at the University of Cape Town involved making movies and Marxist theorising rather than any serious study, but a trip during his fourth year at university changed all that. 'My father put me on a cargo ship to America', says Durbach, and a visit to Louis Kahn's Exeter Library in New Hampshire crystallised for him what great architecture could do. 'I realise it is a cliché, but I had this amazing physical reaction to it,' he says. 'I gave up the frivolous stuff and became addicted to architecture and worked obsessively.'

While Kahn's architecture carried great sway in South Africa, Durbach was to find other heroes, both locally and internationally. Close to home it was Roelof Uytenbogaardt, a practising architect and professor of planning at the University of Cape Town, who paid little heed to the colonial heritage and rigorously pursued abstraction. His emphatically sculptural buildings defined what it was to be progressive in Cape Town in the Seventies, and the students revered his uncompromising approach.

'His works were amazingly ahead of their time,' says Durbach. 'Although he studied with Kahn, he drifted into a more Corbusian oeuvre and produced these incredibly athletic, muscular spatial works.' For similar reasons, Durbach is drawn to the work of Le Corbusier and James Stirling. He admires Le Corbusier's willingness to subvert the expected, and in Stirling's work he applauds the expansive gesture, the materially massive and his lack of concern for the overly detailed. Durbach is drawn to a devil-may-care attitude, the broad brush and the big idea – he finds fussiness tiresome.

As a student, another pressing question was what it meant to be African and how architecture should manifest in that context. 'It was incredibly important at the time, and there were the two schools of thought,' says Durbach. 'Those that adopted a sort of postmodern adaptation of forms where everything looked African and those that felt it necessary to understand the deep history and the connection with the land.'

Voids in the wall are practical – the doorway – and aesthetic, with the geometric treatment puncturing the wall's solidity, allowing a beam to cut through at ceiling height.

It was to Australia in 1983 that Durbach 'dragged these complexities', inspired by Australian movies of the time – George Miller's _Mad Max_ and Peter Weir's _The Last Wave_. He felt their energy and rawness, and assumed they were the product of a land where risks were taken and conventions flouted. Another drawcard was a compelling image, in _Rolling Stone_ magazine, of the architect John Andrews in his office, blue water visible through a window behind him. Again, a lifestyle choice was to be a motivating force for Durbach.

What he found in Australia took him slightly by surprise. While culturally it was certainly more clubby and conservative than he had imagined, he also found the architecture to be 'lightweight' – psychologically, as it didn't spring from a place of considered conflict, and physically, as it had none of the muscular attributes he admired.

'What I saw seemed against the qualities I was familiar with,' says Durbach. 'Much of the work seemed overly detailed and precious, indulgent even, and I was used to a cruder but, to me, more intense architecture. The debate at the time was between postmodernism, and I was working for Ken Woolley on projects in that genre, or exploring what it meant to be Australian, as were Murcutt and some people from Cox Architects. While I was essentially uncomfortable with both positions, there was a sense that you had to choose a side.'

In the end, it seems he didn't choose a side but rather stuck to his own path – the Australian aesthetic perhaps tempering his original predisposition, as he grew to appreciate the beauty in what he at first saw as insubstantial. He entered architectural competitions and had success, along with Harry Levine (with documentation in association with Allen Jack + Cottier), in winning the additions to Tusculum, the nineteenth century villa that is home to what was then the RAIA, now the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA).

It was a challenging commission with the problems of how to marry the venerable old building with a contemporary vision, and how to fit an auditorium, a gallery and additional office space into a relatively small site. Given that it was the RAIA headquarters, there was also the pressure to deliver something notable that managed to articulate what the profession stood for. 'I will always admire Glenn [Murcutt] for choosing us, as we were young and not well-known,' says Durbach. With such a significant commission under his belt, did this put him on the map, I asked. 'No,' he replies, 'nothing seemed to put us on the map. We just started over again.'

With a recession looming, Durbach took up teaching at the University of Sydney, where Lawrence Nield was a professor and Peter Stutchbury was teaching next door. He met interesting people, taught himself to be more methodical, and honed his architectural philosophy. It was here he met Camilla Block, and they started working together in 1992, forming a partnership in 1997.

Camilla Block had come to Sydney from Johannesburg with her parents at the age of 12 but went back under her own steam as a fourth year architecture student for a two-year stint in an architectural firm. 'It was interesting to discover that there was a deep down connection to the landscape and buildings of your childhood. It was like coming home,' she says. Workwise she was thrown in at the deep end and came to understand clearly the direct relationship between what you draw and what you build. Near mistakes were averted and a steep learning curve took place. Acknowledging a passion for South Africa, she also admits that it takes a huge amount of energy to live in such a fraught place. Her return to Australia was of her own volition. 'I immigrated with my parents the first time and the second time I "immigrated"myself,' she says.

In the early days for Durbach and Block, renovations and additions provided bread and butter income, before commissions, principally from friends, for entire houses began to filter through. The Darling Point House (1992) was one, on a site so difficult to access Durbach says it was akin to building a ship in a bottle.

'It's a house where the beauty of it creeps up on you quite slowly,' he says. 'While there is nothing really to see, the journey through the space is important. You travel from the ground to the sky winding through rooms, to a roof terrace, across a bridge. The goal was to make a small house seem bigger.'

The project with Droga began as a renovation of the five existing floors of a substantial brick warehouse in Surry Hills, near Central railway station – at the time, a rundown part of Sydney's inner city. After renting there for five years, Droga had bought the building in 1995, as part of a co-operative with his brother and friends. The plan was that each of the partners in the project would retain a floor, and Durbach Block would give the building an overhaul of plumbing, electricity, lifts, foyer and so on, and create a workable floor plan for a work and living space.

The kitchen steps up to the north and sits below the mezzanine level, while sharing its city view. The flare of the island and the apple green cabinets create a slightly off-kilter interior that rejects the convention of the straight line. The Louis Poulsen PH6 hanging lights are perfect in form and scale for this large, open space.

The strong shadow of the brise soleil adds to the drama of the terrace and emphasises the counterbalance between its rectilinear structure and the muscular curves of the building itself. As Block points out, many of their buildings 'inhale' to create outdoor space, and this is a fine example of its effectiveness.

During the exploration of floor space ratio, Droga and Durbach Block realised that by a canny reallocation of space from the five floors, more than a roof garden could be built on top. Block had admired the utilitarian beauty of the raw building they were working with, but now the project had the additional challenge of creating something distinctive and architecturally ambitious.

The internal debate in Durbach Block is an interesting one of context and how that, in turn, drives form. 'We strive to transform architectural language by getting inside it and understanding it, and in turn altering how people see it,' says Block. They walk a knife edge, anxious to avoid 'noisiness' but also desirous not to blend in. Theirs is not an anonymous architecture but rather one of 'fit' where they skilfully define the terms of what it means to fit.

The scheme utilised the entire floor space of the roof and, when examining the drawing of the elevation, the relationship to its brick base is clear. There are strong vertical alignments that anchor the penthouse and create a sense that, although different and contemporary, it has strong links to its base. 'There is a sense of permission to play above the parapet line,' says Block. 'The penthouse has been described as a lizard on a rock – it has an anthropological quality.'

'The Droga Apartment was the first time we tried something as sculptural on that scale,' recalls Durbach. 'At first we were thinking about using brick and in a more "boxy"arrangement. It was Harry Levine, looking at a model, who said "What happened to all those curves you used to do?"' That changed the course of the project but when they looked at the revised model, Durbach's reaction was, 'Oh my God, this is hideous,' and he felt the whole thing could be a disaster. The other major shift was the external cladding material. 'Daniel and I used to look at the building as we passed on the train, and one day he said, "Why don't we use a reflective material for the façade".'

Droga had retained a memory of a photo in an architectural exhibition of a copper clad power station in the German countryside. 'It was both protective and a foreign object in its setting.'

In the Droga Apartment, the resulting panels of zinc that turn golden as the afternoon sun hits the west-facing portion of the exterior, give the structure a wholly different dimension. 'We have made a number of buildings that seem to inhale to create outdoor space,' says Block. 'With your back to the curve of the terrace, in the deep recess, you feel protected in what is a tough neighbourhood.'

One imagines that something so radical would at least have raised an eyebrow in council. Surprisingly the project was supported, in particular by Penny Day, a planner at Sydney Council, who gave a great deal of advice around what was possible, and was clearly key in unlocking the possibility of the penthouse level. As Droga points out, in a more salubrious part of the city, there would have been many more restrictions: its context gave it freedom.

The brief for the interior was a 'big warehousey sort of space', which Durbach Block delivered via a huge curved room with steel beams linking to the industrial roots of the building. 'The geometry of the site was a given and we chose to make one stable shape to hold steady, and the rest – the bedrooms and bathroom – take up the exigencies,' says Block. This is made very clear by the plan, which the architects describe as three hinged bands emerging from the northern corner of the building. One band forms the terrace, the second the living space, which rises up to the kitchen at the north, and the third the service areas and the bedrooms.

This main space is animated by the approach to the internal walls. They are neither straight nor absolute – there are curves and cutaways – openings for function and openings for effect.

Discussing a series of 13 projects in the Pesaro Architectural Monograph _Durbach Block_ , Philip Goad comments, 'Each project is characterised by inhabited walls that are bent, skewed, canted or carved into.' Durbach had a great deal of enthusiasm for the work of American architect Steven Holl and some of the cutaway devices in the Droga Apartment pay homage to his work.

The staircase, hidden behind one such wall, draws you up to a mezzanine level, which sits above the kitchen and shares the city view. For Block, the apartment's two main views are significant. 'From the terrace it is the much flatter horizontal view of the low inner-city buildings and the railway line, while from the northern windows it is a more vertical view towards the city towers.' Droga felt that the second storey was integral to the building's success. 'The height of the mezzanine gives it presence and a certain sculptural elegance, and creates the impression that the brick base of the original building is acting as an oversized plinth for the penthouse.'

Two things slightly alarmed the architects about the project. One was the level of building work it unleashed: the street was closed the whole time because of the crane, and there was scaffolding over the entire laneway. And the second was the publicity around winning both the national and state awards in the same year. Durbach admits to being 'very unprepared' and inching out of frame in a TV interview. Why, I ask, was it so celebrated? 'I think in a messy part of the city it feels heroic,' he says.

The mezzanine has been used as a bedroom and a second sitting room. The depth of the window recess allows it to be used as seating, and Droga likes to sit with his back in the right-hand corner of the window seat and watch the train movements through the horizontal window opposite.

The staircase to the mezzanine is inserted between two dynamic walls: curved and cutaway to the left, and open to a deeply recessed window to the right.

DETAILS THE DROGA APARTMENT

BRISE SOLEIL This Corbusian-influenced brise soleil (French for sun breaker) on the western side of the building provides a visual counterpoint to the curves of the zinc with its strong, regulated presence. It is also one of the ways the architects have created a relationship with the building below – this structure lines up with the brickwork beneath it. Originally it was intended to have horizontal timber blinds fitted to enable further regulation of the sun (admitting it in winter and screening it in summer) – they did not eventuate but the brise soleil still throws its dramatic shadows back onto the terrace and the building itself at certain times of the day.

KITCHEN The raised kitchen area is situated at the northern end of the building with a window wall of glazing facing the CBD views. There are also long slices of glazing to the west and east, ensuring the kitchen is bright. Just as the walls in the apartment are curved, the central island bench does not conform to the traditional rectangle but, rather, flares outwards with organic rounded edges. The choice of a subtle apple green colour (first used in the award-winning Einfeld Apartment) for the benches and behind the glass surfaces is restful and creates the sense of an urban oasis.

CURVES AND CUTAWAYS  One of the notable aspects of this building is the distinctive treatment of the main interior walls. This is most dramatic in the sweeping curves of the massive wall to the west, with fine steel-framed doors and windows connecting it to the terrace. To the east the dividing wall feels three-dimensional in the way it has been formed, splaying and tapering in converging layers. There are sharp cutaways for practical reasons, such as door openings, and there are geometric cutaways that graphically illustrate the three-dimensional quality of the wall. All the walls are painted white so the emphasis is very much on form enhanced through light and shade.

FRONT DOOR The steel-plated front door is a compositional exploration of the connected and folded possibilities of steel. The strong pink surround, aptly named 'Cherries Jubilee', was chosen by Lyndell Droga (who also managed much of the project), and indicates that something special lies behind. In a tough neighbourhood the door signals strength, but strength tempered by beauty. In the lobby, says Durbach, 'we exaggerated the beams to make the weight seems monstrous, and pinched the walls to suggest compression. It is a calm space as distinct from the noisy street.' While this building is an old warehouse in principle, as is made clear right from the entrance, it now has the overlay of dynamic modernist thinking.

ZINC CLADDING The zinc was chosen for aesthetic and practical reasons as it didn't require regular painting to maintain it. In fact, there was a sense that the zinc would develop a patina that would simply improve over the years. Droga also pointed out the thermal qualities of the construction with Hebel block, render, battens, ply and zinc forming a thick protective wall that combated the fierce heat of the westerly sun and noise-proofed the apartment by creating a strong seal to the sounds of the city below. The architects worked with a zinc specialist company, Rheinzink, to produce the cladding.

BATHROOM  With the main statement, and the primary focus of architectural intent in the apartment, being the sweeping living and dining space, it was only to be expected that the bedrooms would be compact. As a result, the amazing dimensions of the ensuite come as something of a surprise. Arranged in the Japanese model of separate wet (bath and open shower) and dry (basin and toilet) areas, it communicates a sense of functional luxury through the use of large limestone tiles and the simple, almost blocky design. Its lack of fussy detail and broad-stroke confidence is characteristic of Durbach Block's work.
1996–1997 THE KEW HOUSE
SEAN GODSELL

Sean Godsell's gridded steel box cantilevers out to the west. While the house is clearly visible from the street, the rusted steel obscures the interior life of the house.

Reclaimed timber boards have been oiled, and the play of light from the steel grids adds to their rich character.

'ALTHOUGH APPARENTLY "MODERN"IN ITS LANGUAGE THE HOUSE IS PRIMORDIAL IN ITS INTENT – RUST, OILED SECONDHAND BOARDS, RECYCLED DECKING AND LACK OF "PRECIOUS"DETAIL COMBINE WITH THE RUDIMENTARY SERVICES TO FORM A HOUSE WHICH ISELEMENTAL RATHER THAN PROCESSED.' SEAN GODSELL

The view along the northern facing side of the house shows the two entrances with their formidable steel doors raised.

SEAN GODSELL WAS BORN TO ARCHITECTURE. As a small boy he sat on the knee of his father, architect David Godsell, and watched him draw. He tagged along with him to building site visits and even committed to paper in his neat six-year-old script, 'I want to be an Architect and draw all kinds of houses with my dad.'

David Godsell started his career in the Fifties in the offices of society architect Guilford Bell, and while they had fundamentally different architectural philosophies – Godsell was an advocate of Frank Lloyd Wright while Bell was more of a classicist – there was a great deal of mutual respect. Godsell was appointed site architect for Bell's large office building project, Feltex House, when he was only 26 years old.

However, in 1960 Godsell set up on his own with the architectural intent 'to embrace and enhance the beauty of the site on which the building stands for occupier and viewer'. His Wrightian ideals were to find full expression in his own practice, particularly with his Kennedy House (1964) and Chapman House (1965).

Sean Godsell grew up in Beaumaris, a beachside suburb of Melbourne, in a house of his father's design. 'Dad made himself a yacht, it was a very casual, very Australian existence. And, yes, we were considered to have the weird house.'

The site was difficult and, like many architects' own homes, took a long time to complete, but the result was an arrangement of space that accommodated all the family's needs, including parents' quarters and the architecture office at street level. Sean Godsell's mother, Ursula, still lives in the house.

Ask Godsell what he learnt from his father and his answer is profound. 'I learnt from him the importance of the making, and crafting, of a building. It became unfashionable in the post-modern era but I am happy to see it is making a return. When I was approached by Japanese architectural magazine _GA_ to write an essay on any part of residential architecture, I chose to write about the window mullion. Too many contemporary architects pick windows from a brochure. One of the ways an architect working on residential projects can express themselves is through mastery of the detail.' He not only absorbed an appreciation of technical skills but a fundamental core of philosophy that informs everything he does. Godsell Snr once said he 'would rather dig ditches to support his family than compromise his architectural integrity', and Sean Godsell's practice is underpinned by the same stance. Hence it is small and, as architectural commentator Leon Van Schaik points out, he operates in an 'intensely individual atelier mode'.

The entrance, through native grasses, leads straight into the large-scale living room with two separate seating zones. The cantilevered section to the right faces the city view.

Godsell-designed sofas, inspired by Donald Judd, sit around the fireplace. Artworks are propped, not hung, giving the sense of a casually curated space.

Growing up around the practical aspects of architecture did have its drawbacks when it came to academia. 'So much was intuitive for me that I struggled in the first years of university to see it as an academic pursuit. I saw it to be about building and was impatient. I was playing Australian Rules footy professionally for St Kilda Football Club and thought I could wing it until I got to the juicy bit of the course and then concentrate,' he says. When he failed a subject by one mark, 'it was a kick in the pants'. It was engineering, the subject he thought he was best at, which 'made me realise I had to learn the theory if I was serious about what I wanted to do'.

After graduation he was determined to be exposed to as much as possible and to discover for himself what made the great buildings great. He travelled to Japan where he admired the work of Shinohara and Ando, Finland where he visited most of Aalto's buildings, and to France, to Le Corbusier's convent, La Tourette, and Villa Savoye. His observation that 'photos tell a thousand lies' was strengthened by what he saw. 'Photographs of architecture can be very deceiving, and when you see a building it can be completely different, either much better or much worse,' he says. 'I do feel my father's work would have benefited had he had the opportunity to see the buildings he admired first-hand.'

Godsell's education also developed by working in practices both in Melbourne and in London during the Eighties. As a third year student, he worked for Edmond & Corrigan, and in London worked for Sir Denys Lasdun, responsible for, among many other buildings, the Royal National Theatre on London's South Bank. 'I have witnessed creative people under duress. Lasdun was 73 when I was 26 and he was still terrifying, so emotional and passionate – I adored him,' says Godsell.

Returning to Melbourne in 1989, at the beginning of the recession, he was raring to go but had to wait. He worked for various firms and bided his time. In 1992 he built the Faraday House in Carlton for his wife, Annemarie Kiely, and son, Jack. 'I needed to do that, to build a house. And it is a classic first house with some good ideas and full of flaws,' he admits.

Other projects followed. Another house, an addition and gradually his work began to attract attention from the media and win awards and the recognition of his peers. It was the commission for the S Gandolfo house alteration (1994) from old clients of his father's that enabled him to form his own company, Godsell Associates, in the same year.

When it came to building a second house for his family, Godsell and Kiely looked around Kew because that is where they thought Jack might go to school. 'It was Annemarie who found the land – a tiny garden subdivision of the house to the immediate north,' says Godsell. To him, as to his father, the site is of paramount importance.

'I struggle with every single building and it takes a long time to get everything right. So there are always a number of variations on the idea. Now I realise that this is part of my technique. That I refine and refine and even when I am building I refine and refine,' he says. 'In the end all I wanted was a very simple pavilion which caught the city views and gave us the possibility of having north-facing outdoor space or another building later on.'

The table is at the heart of family life – for working, eating and entertaining. It is large enough to accommodate it all, possibly at the same time.

The furnishings themselves are spare and there is a sense of discipline that only the 'right' sculptures, lights, fabrics and artworks make it into the house to stay. An Akari standing light by Noguchi and a sculpture by Pilar Rojas have made the grade.

Godsell regards his house at Kew as part of his early work but recognises its contribution as a platform for his subsequent, more mature phase. 'For me it is a significant building even though I know why and where it is derivative, and who the architects were that influenced me at the time,' he says. 'For this building, I looked at a number of architects who had produced cantilevered steel structures – Ellwood, Johnson, Eames and Breuer had all done them – and I liked Jean Nouvel's Le Saint-James in Bordeaux. I admire his work a lot and think he is one of the truly innovative architects of the last 50 years.'

The house is modest in size. As Godsell says of the project, 'We were young and poor and we built it on the smell of an oily rag, and there is something gauche about building more than you really need.' But adversity is the mother of invention and Godsell's solution of utilising standard dimension walkway grids in 350MPa steel and rusting and oiling them gives the simple pavilion a distinctive character. While the context is suburban, the bold cantilever (5.5 m) and the rusted surface treatment combine to give it a monumental feel. 'I find the way nature attacks a building is interesting. Architects and builders are largely trained to resist nature. Rusted steel is a classic example. Explain to a builder how to rust steel and they look horrified.'

The plan is very simple and considered. The 170 square metre rectangle is bisected lengthwise; on the north side is the large living area and on the south a series of smaller rooms – bedrooms, bathrooms and a study. The kitchen is at the eastern end and a large seven metre table runs its entire length.

'The divided plan shows the influence of Asia on Australia,' says Godsell. 'In this building it is contrived and deliberate, to highlight the possibility that Australian architecture could be influenced by the west _and_ the east.' The living area has a sliding wall to separate the space and create two areas, just as in Japanese architecture a series of rooms is animated by operating screens. The house has no corridors and so has a continuous flow of space, which Godsell admits was easier with a small child than a teenager.

'The gesture to the west, the symbol of Australian life, was the table, because the kitchen is the focal point in the house,' he says. 'We don't bother about formal dining, hanging around in the kitchen is normal.'

As Godsell deems this house part of his early work is there anything he would change? 'I think it is incredibly dangerous for architects to tinker with their earlier decisions but the house is 14 years old and I would like to bring it a new lease of life,' he says. So he has designed a separate building, sensitively sited to the north and constructed in rusted steel.

'We plan to rip out the bathroom and spend more money on it and upgrade the kitchen appliances. This is not a building I would ever want to leave. We have had some fantastic times here, and some wonderful architects such as Peter Zumthor and Rick Joy have visited.'

And one can see why. The space is beautiful, sunlit and comfortable. The rusted grids give a sense of enclosure while still enabling the view of the city in the distance. Behind the longest kitchen table in Melbourne, outside a commercial premises, is a wall of rusted steel with an aged patina that glows when the northerly light hits it.

Art works are propped casually against walls and the backs of sofas, a couple of Akari lights by Noguchi add a soft sculptural presence, while two timber sofas designed by Godsell, in the style of Donald Judd, sit on either side of an open fire. The recycled floorboards combine with the steel and glass to reinforce the sense that this is a robust house with genuine character.

It feels creative and nurturing and would have been a great environment for a child to grow up in. A neighbour, with an interest in psychology, implored Godsell to rethink his design for fear of the damaging effects on the mental health of his young son, need not have worried. Jack is now studying medicine at university.

Detail is careful and considered but never extraneous. Godsell is an architect for whom rigour and principle are everything. 'The creative process is about endless decisions, applying good judgment to each element from the tap fitting to the external materials. There are lots of individual decisions, which also need to work collectively. You pay the price if they are wrong.'

Knowing that with the Kew House he was still at the stage of 'figuring stuff out', Godsell had an awareness that the next house had to be great in order for him to make a leap professionally. Designed in 1998 and completed in 2000, the Carter/Tuck House did just that. It gained a great deal of recognition locally and internationally, winning awards in Australia, UK and Best Building in the Region in the World Architecture Awards announced in Hong Kong in 2001. It also enhanced his reputation as something of a 'hard man' of architecture. 'Steel boxes were designed to go at the entry and some knucklehead had put a blow torch near them and the steel buckled. It was close to the end of the building process and I was so angry I went around the corner into the bathroom and whacked my head, like a Liverpool kiss, in sheer frustration,' says Godsell.

The other project that catapulted his career was the development of the Future Shack project, an emergency housing solution made from recycled shipping containers. Features such as height-adjustable legs for uneven ground and a parasol roof for shade that could be packed away and stored in the container itself illustrate the practicality of his thinking. 'I have two responsibilities as an architect: one is to be true to myself and be an artist of the utmost integrity which is what I have tried to do; the other responsibility is to be a really vigilant and analytical observer of society – by doing so we remain relevant to society.'

He followed Future Shack with a design called Park Bench House in 2002 in order to provide the homeless with shelter. British style bible _Wallpaper*_ nominated Godsell as one of the people destined to 'change the way we live'. Not only was he the only Australian, he was the only architect on the list.

His stance hasn't always made him popular. He works as a sole practitioner with a small team, with one local and one overseas student, and a permanent assistant. Because he keeps the scale small, he feels no obligation to take on projects in which he feels he cannot maintain the integrity of the work, giving him a reputation for arrogance. He knows how destructive the profession can be. 'It is very demanding. Most architects start out as sensitive dreamers and a lot of us end up bitter and twisted because it is a form of artistic expression that is so vulnerable to other people's influence and input along the way – be it the client or the local authority.'

One feels that with Godsell, maintaining the rigour is everything and that when he looks back over his career at his body of work he wants it to be flawless. Does this create a pressure? 'Pressure,' he says, 'is kicking a goal in front of 50,000 people and hearing the collective groan if you miss.'

The rusted wall that spans the eastern end of the main living space has a very beautiful patina that responds to the varying pattern of light throughout the day. Sitting in front of it is a sculpture by Jan Learmonth.

The way the light engages with the building externally and internally is one of its remarkable aspects.

The bedroom is entered via a sliding door, and the geometry of light creates its own decorative pattern in the simply decorated space.

DETAILS THE KEW HOUSE

ENTRY The house is divided lengthways, with the open plan living space facing north. The drawbridge-style entrance is situated on the long side of the house. The site is elevated (the building cantilevers 5.5 m to the west) and the stepped approach to the house does not fail to create a sense of expectation. 350 MPa steel, which was sealed when it oxidised to its present rust colour, has been used for the construction. Godsell is aware that builders and architects are trained to resist the effects of nature on materials, but in this instance it is intrinsic to the design of the house.

NOGUCHI LIGHT As with all of Noguchi's Akari lights, made by Japanese lighting company Ozeki & Co., the UF4-L10 lamp uses hand-made washi paper to filter the light from a standard incandescent bulb. Noguchi described it as 'the harshness of electricity"transformed through the magic of paper back to the light of our origin – the sun'. While the golden glow of the Akari lights is appealing, really it's the brilliance of Noguchi's ability as a sculptor that has transformed the lights from their traditional origins as ceremonial temple lanterns into a subtle piece of lighting sculpture. Over 100 variations of floor, table and pendant lights were designed by Noguchi over a nearly 40-year period.

KITCHEN  Godsell is the first to admit that the house was built 'on the smell of an oily rag', and certain elements, such as the kitchen are kept simple and minimal. There is an interesting play of scale: the dining table is an enormous seven metres, running the length of the back wall of the house, while the kitchen cabinetry and appliances are neat and restrained. Godsell's approach is about appropriate space allocated to appropriate use and he finds the current trend for oversized houses, in which you have more space than you can possibly use, rather gauche.

STUDY The house mixes philosophies from the east as much as the west, and the floorplan is essentially Eastern in concept. There are no corridors, and the bedrooms and study inter-connect. Hence the flow of the house is circulatory in nature. The rooms, such as the study shown here, are small, with simple built-in furniture but filled with character through the choice of artworks. The large glass panel slides open to give a meaningful connection to the outdoors.

CLEMENT MEADMORE Born in 1929 in Melbourne, sculptor Clement Meadmore graduated in aeronautical engineering from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1949. In the Fifties it was his work in steel that excited him most and for what he is best remembered. He settled in New York in 1963, and his work appears in a large number of contemporary art museums and prestigious collections, including the Museum of Modern Art. Most of his work is based on a hollow rectangular beam, which is drawn out in a defiant gesture or bent around itself. Meadmore's work reveals a highly developed sense of balance and proportion, alongside a quiet dynamism.

SLIDING DOOR  While Godsell views the table as symbolic of Australian life (as the heart of the home), other elements of his thinking pay homage to Japanese architecture, particularly the division of space. In Western culture, space is changed in section, but in Japan, he says, 'a series of rooms is only animated by operating screens'. The large living area is treated in this way with a floor-to-ceiling sliding screen allowing the room to be divided in two. This solution is contrived and deliberate, highlighting the possibility that Australian architecture could be influenced by the east and the west.
1997–1999 THE REEVES HOUSE
PETER STUTCHBURY & SUE HARPER

The north-facing aspect opens to surrounding decks and landscape.

The 'twisted' roofline manages light and breeze by rising to the east and turning down to the west to admit sun in winter and keep it out in summer.

'STUTCHBURY SITS FIRMLY WITHIN THE AUSTRALIAN TRADITION OF ELEVATING THE HONESTY AND DIRECTNESS OF THE RURAL SHED TO A MEASURE OF STRUCTURAL AND FORMAL PURITY.' PROFESSOR PHILIP GOAD

Looking back at the glazed entrance set between two heavy masonry walls.

The deck in the living area faces the trees and water views to the west. The large-scale windows on the northern side of the room slide open to engage completely with the surrounding landscape. This allows the already minimal sense of structure to further reduce and allow nature in.

IF EVER AN ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE WERE wedded to its geography, it is Peter Stutchbury Architecture. Not only is the fit topographical, it is a marriage that works intellectually, socially and creatively. The Peninsula, a finger of land stretching north from Sydney's CBD, is defined by its landscape of native trees, sandstone escarpments and spectacular water views: the Pacific Ocean lies to the east and the expanse of Pittwater to the west. Stutchbury's office is located at Newport, a beachside suburb with an all-year-round holiday atmosphere. While to many it is the 'insular peninsula' (once you are there why would you ever leave?), it has a long history of holiday houses and weekenders for Sydneysiders wanting a place to relax only an hour's drive from home.

Property prices have dramatically risen since the Eighties – when Stutchbury bought his first block of land in Clareville in 1985 it was one of the cheapest suburbs to buy in in Sydney, matched only by Emu Plains in the far west. Simply constructed beach houses in fibro cement have given way to architect-designed homes for clients with a desire to embrace the environment while demanding a high level of architectural sophistication. There are also those who live there full time – people whose work does not demand the rigour of a nine to five existence, and who tend towards the artistic and creative professions with an appreciation of architectural merit and alternative thinking. It is among these two types of people that Stutchbury has gradually built up a loyal client base that understands his open, honest architectural style and his innate ability to manage climate, site, materials and orientation.

From this small and specific point on the globe, his reputation has spread. In 2007, Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake set his office the task of searching the world for an architect who could design a retreat on oceanfront land outside Tokyo. Miyake already had a Samurai and a Geisha House sited there for guest and staff use, and he wanted a house for himself. The brief to find the architect was succinct – only five words: nature, function, environment, connection and wild – and with just these words to work with, and a search of 14 months, they found Stutchbury. The finished house is an exercise in refinement and is movingly beautiful. The palette of materials is spare, the detailing fine and the balance of innovation and tradition is matched only by the sensitive link to the site and the existing buildings. As Stutchbury told Miyake, 'Everything I have learnt is in there', and, in avoiding a modern, provocative work, he feels he has managed to create something timeless, as befits his client and the building's context.

All the layers of his life's experience have led precisely to the point where this commission was not only possible but also highly appropriate. Nature and a relationship with the land was a major part of his upbringing. His mother, Gwenda, went as far as articulating that she wanted her sons to have a city education but the knowledge of the country. So while they attended Knox, a private school on Sydney's North Shore, much of their recreational time was spent on their aunt's property, Manuka, south-west of Cobar in central western New South Wales. This was a formative experience on many levels. 'The country is a legible place, a city might be open to very different interpretations, but the country and its buildings are very honest – they can't afford not to be,' he says. 'For me the bush experience was profound.'

This sense of 'letting the country do some talking in your life' is something he is keen to pass on to his own children. He also worked hard physically, and the rigour and discipline needed to survive gave him a respect for the land that has become ingrained in his professional and personal persona. From the age of four he would sit agog at the tales his uncle, Don Mosely, a long-serving missionary in Papua New Guinea, would tell of headhunters, cannibals and tribal life in this near neighbour to Australian shores. And while it may be too obvious to link Stutchbury's passion for travel in later life to this early exposure to wildness and adventure, these tales must have painted a compelling picture of other worlds and other cultures.

Stutchbury holds the view that character is shaped in percentages: 30 percent is inherent, 30 percent is from your parents and 40 percent is developed. For Stutchbury, the sums really do add up. While there are no architects in his family tree, there is an assortment of professions – engineers, artists, builders, surveyors, bridge designers. Add their skills together and you have an architect, he points out. His parents brought very different things to the gene pool. His mother, with her capacity for intuition, is described as his 'guardian angel that shaped the softness and care and the understanding of people'. His father, Ernest Stutchbury, on the other hand, was primarily a practical man who lived and breathed construction and ran International Combustion for many years, building power stations and hence shaping Australia's energy industry. Both aspects have played out in Stutchbury's life. The intuitive side has led him to people whose work or philosophy he feels a strong emotional connection with and who, in turn, have shaped his outlook and approach. While Stutchbury is a self-confessed idealist, his father's emphasis on practicality is not lost and has encouraged in him an ability to build and to think logically about structure and stability. They are, indeed, the yin and yang of his personality.

When it comes to the 40 percent of factors and people that developed his character, there is no shortage. While his schooling was sound, if uninspiring, he found life studying architecture at the University of Newcastle pleasingly free of social stratification. However, living in a farmhouse and surfing every second day, he still struggled with the discipline of study, and credits the faith, and teaching skill, of Eric Parker with leading him from being a student who repeated first year to one who graduated with honours six years later. To this day Stutchbury praises what he learnt at university from watercolour artist Malcolm Parker; Gordon Appleby, part of the Sydney School of Architecture; and Ted Harkness, who pioneered studies into shade and ventilation.

While Stutchbury admired the work of Bruce Rickard and John Andrews, it was his relationship with Richard Leplastrier that allowed his architectural philosophy to flourish and find its true form.

A friend of Stutchbury's at university had recommended he meet Leplastrier but, before he had the chance to do so, he snuck into his partly built Palm House. 'The beautiful terrazzo floor and the steel frame were the kind of architecture I dreamt about, and here it was being built,' he recalls. 'I wasn't there long when I heard the rumble of a VW pulling up and Rick and the client got out. I hid in the garden but listened for 45 minutes to the most inspiring conversation. It is just the most beautiful building in Australia.'

Meeting Leplastrier not long after at a friend's wedding, Stutchbury undertook a study of his work, which enabled them to spend time together. 'I would make models and drawings and stay with him at Lovett Bay – he had this little helper. He is a remarkable man who coloured my world and laid the foundation of my architectural thinking.' Leplastrier also introduced him to his drawing tutor at university, Lloyd Rees, who was also to become a friend of Stutchbury's and a strong role model.

Yet not all Stutchbury's influences were through academia or other architects. His search was for a more primal understanding, shown through his thesis on the Aboriginal people ( _Australian Aboriginals_ , 1977) and their relationship with the land. For several months Stutchbury lived on the banks of the Darling River at Wilcannia in far western New South Wales. He recalls: 'I would get up at 6am every day and draw Aboriginal tools, hand signs or boomerangs, and what washed through me was how they lived in the landscape was sufficient to sustain them.'

As Neilsen Warren, his first employer at Quay Architects and, later, friend, wisely pointed out, it allowed Stutchbury to 'get in touch with values, the beauty of extreme economy, aesthetics unrelated to price. Accommodation in terms of acceptance, mutuality and the extended family.'

Two years later he left for another adventure – this time to Papua New Guinea for 18 months to do a postgraduate study of the longhouse. 'I helped my uncle design and build a church in Port Moresby,' he says. 'I didn't get paid but it enabled me to get around on a mission plane and stay in mission accommodation so that I could measure and photograph 45 different longhouses for my thesis.'

The buildings were an exercise in the elimination of wastage and made Stutchbury realise just how 'pure architecture a building could be'. The church was an extremely refined building despite its elementary nature and one of its key elements was the simple beauty of the twisted tapered roof' in turn a signature element in the Reeves House.

Travel was now in his blood and his career settled into a pattern of undertaking small buildings, or extensions, for a network of family and friends predominantly in the locale of the Northern Beaches. He then used the money to travel, and travel seriously: a year on an architectural scholarship backpacking through Africa, trips to Asia, Europe and eventually to his ancestral home, Scotland.

In the mid-Eighties he bought land in Clareville and started to build his own house in a 'series of experiments' with materials and structure. He knew he wanted the landscape to remain free, so he built a horizontal platform in the trees with a parasol roof. It's this, and his inventive use of steel portal frames, that give the building a sense of lightness. He is aware of the freedom he experienced building for his then-wife and partner in the practice, Phoebe Pape, and their children. 'Sometimes you can only do it when it is for yourself. You are not scared of changing the poetry if you see something different, and the whole idea of composition can adjust.'

The living, dining, kitchen and bedroom areas are housed under one skillion roof. A change in level (the bedroom is one metre higher than the rest) and a partition wall divide the otherwise open space.

The angle of the roof is apparent, as is the manner in which the indoor and outdoor kitchens are linked.

The bedroom faces its own private deck and is contained by a partition wall that separates it from the corridor and adjacent bathroom. The roofline soars at this point.

More than 10 years later, by which time his reputation had grown, a commission from the Reeves, who had been following his work, was to come his way. Their site was 200 metres down the road from his own house, so the landfall and orientation were familiar territory, but the solutions were very different. Lloyd Rees had applauded Stutchbury for his ability to surround himself with young minds and, in this instance, his collaboration with Sue Harper is proof of the benefits that could bring. Sue Harper had been taught by both Stutchbury and Leplastrier at Sydney University before working with Troppo Architects in the Northern Territory for six years and Stutchbury for a further six years. This house was designed after she had set up on her own and she recalls the project with evident pleasure.

'We had an open-minded client, and the process of working with Pete's sense of invention was fun. But most pleasing of all there was a strong simple form and clear planning to work with, and the drama coming from one element – the twisted roof.'

'This was a very steep block with a water course running through it, and so we had to deal with it both physically and emotionally so the qualities of the site were best maintained,' says Stutchbury. 'We have used the corridor entrance as a defining wall and tapered it from narrow to wide to express the flow of water which now runs down the side of it.' This masonry corridor not only provides a significant sense of entrance and introduction to the house but it turns on its head, or rather on its side, the manner in which Stutchbury had worked with the balance of weight and lightness in his previous buildings, where the weight had more conventionally been at the base.

The long bathroom doubles as a dressing room and is as near to showering outdoors as is possible.

Extensive use of glazing combines with fine steel supports (inside and out) to create the feeling of openness that characterises the house. The deep eaves of the corrugated iron roof ensures shade in summer.

At the Reeves House, the use of rough masonry walls to the south, running perpendicular to the site, was something of a breakthrough for Stutchbury. 'In this building, I really learnt the lesson of thermal mass,' he says. 'It holds the heat in winter and discharges it into the house, and in summer the heat is dispersed through ventilation at either end of the corridor. Until this point I hadn't understood that potential.'

The other major aspect of the house plan is how the siting works with the topography, and with the desire to balance openness with both visual and aural privacy. 'Our aim was to organise the building so that it connects most with landscape and least with urbanscape.'

With only a series of small window openings to the south, the polycarbonate roof here ensures the area is always light, and the tapering has the effect of drawing you into the house. The mix of concrete and timber is used even in stair treads. It is this balance of materials, along with the twisted roof and the indoor/outdoor kitchen, that makes it for Stutchbury, 'a landmark building, an honest building, expressing so many of the things that preoccupied the practice at the time'.

The plan shows how much of the floor area is devoted to outdoor space.

Harper concurs. 'I really like the clear definition of space. The northern side is the active side and the space between the two blade walls is a movement zone, with a subtle, soft feeling achieved by the light coming through the polycarbonate ceiling.'

While the entrance corridor feels solid, weighted and monumental, the main living area feels, by contrast, almost shockingly light and transparent. Above all else, there is the sense of openness of both the space itself and in the way internal and exterior spaces blur at the edges.

The living, dining, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom are all contained under one canopy roof with the minimal degrees of separation signalled by either changes in level – the bedroom/bathroom zone is one metre higher than the rest of the interior and behind a wall – or changes in flooring, as you move from the interior concrete to the blackbutt decking boards outside.

On this one level alone there are three significant outside spaces, each private and each contributing to the connection with nature. The deck to the west, and the water views, extends the living space; the deck to the north is for cooking and eating outdoors (the original client was a chef); and the deck off the bedroom, again north, provides the ultimate in privacy and the luxury of extensive garden views.

The slightness of the structure is achieved by the use of slim steel 'Y' supports, the extensive use of glazing, and the Perspex-filled gap between the top of the thermal walls and the roof, which as well as enhancing the feeling of lightness also allows for ventilation.

Stutchbury used a twisted roof on his award-winning Olympic Archery Park (1996–98) but the Reeves House was the first time it was used on a residential building. The 'twist' is all about controlling light and airflow. It tilts up to the east to allow in morning light, and down to the west to minimise the strong westerly sun; it pivots to the north to encourage the north-easterly breeze and has deep eaves to the north to admit sun in winter and limit it in summer. It is a generous parasol roof taken beyond the functionality of shelter to provide an intelligent solution to the climatic conditions.

Originally, Harper recalls, there were plans for a plunge pool off the bedroom and an open fire in the living area, which would have contributed to the sense of a connection to nature by pulling the elements of water and fire into the building envelope. The house is remarkable for its ability to connect inside and out and in many ways pays homage to Leplastrier's Palm House in its openness to the garden and the merging of boundaries, allowing minimal shelter and living in the landscape to dominate as central themes.

Hence a decade before Issey Miyake earmarked Stutchbury as the man to deliver on 'nature, function, environment, connection and wild' for his own residence, all the hallmarks are here to be seen in the Reeves House.

DETAILS THE REEVES HOUSE

COOL ROOM While upstairs displays fragility and strength of construction in equal measure, there is a large room, adjacent to the guest bathroom on the ground floor, that maintains a more masculine character through the use of a different material mix. A concrete shell internally is combined with concrete block for the external wall to the south and a low rendered wall facing the street to the west. This is a room designed to be cool in summer, with large timber and glass doors leading to a generous balcony facing the view.

TWISTED ROOF One of the most significant aspects of this house is the twisted line of the skillion roof used for the first time by Stutchbury in a residential building. (It had been used on the Olympic Archery Park, 1996–98). It is designed to capture the morning light and the north-east breeze, lifting up 15 percent towards the north. It also helps express the fact the building is perpendicular to the slope of the hill. The pale-coloured ply of the ceiling has been treated in a manner akin to pickling to allow the texture to come through, and has been lapped to catch the light on one side while butted flat at the other.

MATERIALS  The use of materials in the house is very focused and helps impart the sense of honesty Stutchbury and Harper were keen to convey. Polished concrete for the interior flooring, breezeblock and rough masonry to do the heavy work, and fine ply and light steel supports, under corrugated iron, to let the building breathe. Newer materials such as the polycarbonate for the ceiling in the entrance mix with traditional building materials such as blackbutt for the decks. As all the living spaces are drawn together under one enormous skillion roof, the sense of continuity is maintained.

FOLDING DOORS This is a house that embraces the landscape and opens up opportunities to live outside as much as in. The length of the north face is made up of large-scale timber framed glass doors, which allow the entire house to open up to generous exterior living spaces. Ahead of its time was the outdoor kitchen (the original client was a chef), which continued the line of the indoor kitchen benches to the exterior. The living room opens to the balcony (complete with hammock) to the west, and the bedroom to its own private deck, and bush garden, to the north.

MASONRY WALLS One of the most significant differences for Stutchbury and Harper in this building was the use of the parallel masonry walls on the south side of the house. Previously the 'weight' in Stutchbury's houses had been, more traditionally, at the base. The reasons for this change were twofold: to make use of the properties of thermal mass in terms of heat retention and cooling, and to enable the structure to turn its back on buildings to the south. The solidity of this zone, which is passive and stable, contrasts with the lighter, more active living/dining/kitchen/sleeping area, which connects directly with the landscape.

ENTRANCE  The double height glazing above the front door creates a light filled atrium, and the tapering of this entrance corridor, made more evident by the use of converging timber battens in the ceiling, has the effect of drawing you into the house. The polycarbonate ceiling ensures that this area, which is essentially a zone to move through, remains light and airy despite the thick masonry walls. Stutchbury sees the entrance as the most emotive part of the house, and the material mix in this space retains an organic feel with concrete and timber used together in the stair treads both externally and internally.
1998–2000 THE D HOUSE
DONOVAN HILL

A winner of the Robin Boyd Award for residential architecture in 2001, the façade of the D House reads as a walled garden to the street.

Door details illustrate the jury verdict comments that 'inventive and thoughtful details abound'.

'DESIGN IS A BIT LIKE POETRY - IT CALLS UP SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE RECOGNISE, AND KNOW, BUT CAN'T QUITE PUT THEIR FINGER ON. THE ROLE OF THE DESIGNER IS TO TOUCH THOSE NERVES.' TIMOTHY HILL

The timber screen pulls back to reveal a perfectly curated interior.

ARCHITECTS NAME THEIR HOUSES IN DIFFERENT ways. Traditionally, they were named after the commissioning client. Bruce Rickard, for instance, designed the Curry House in 1967; when the clients came back for a second home, it became Curry House 2. It keeps that name for time immemorial, sometimes, one suspects, to the chagrin of longstanding subsequent owners.

There is also a penchant for naming after a significant aspect of the site (Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater is a stellar example) and many of Peter Stutchbury's buildings use this nomenclature: Deepwater Woolshed and Springwater, for example. So when I first started to explore the work of architects Donovan Hill, I was met with a sea of letters. The T House, the HH House and the C House.

At the end of my interview with the extremely articulate Timothy Hill, I asked rather sheepishly, as though asking his star sign or favourite colour, the meaning of the letter D. The answer, like so many aspects of this exceptional house, both surprised and delighted.

'Each house has an initial that comes into being during construction – derived sometimes from the owner or the location – but in this instance the house developed a nickname. Local Italians used to sit under the trees and watch the builders at work,' says Hill. 'One day a tradesman asked them what they thought and they said that it was the kind of construction they would do in Italy, but for donkeys, not people. To them we were building a stable, so D is for donkey.'

Brian Donovan and Timothy Hill met at the University of Queensland and formed their partnership in 1991 in order to design a shop that sold stuffed animals and specialised in koalas. 'Our partnership is such a quintessentially Queensland thing – so frontier in a way. Our only meaty strategy, which we were barely conscious of at the time, was that whoever rocked up, we would make a go of the job. If they came along wanting a rumpus room it was a starting point for dialogue. With no work behind us we had only the legitimacy of our thinking and we quickly learnt to communicate.'

From tutor Brit Andresen, originally from Norway, they learnt the ability to ask 'What does it mean to people?' as a founding basis for making judgments, rather than simply 'What does it look like?' 'Also being foreign, what she imagined in terms of architecture was a very big idea – to be alongside that captured the imagination, and to be part of the standard minimums she presumed was very valuable,' says Hill.

One of the newly formed practice's first commissions was for a low cost extension at the rear of a Queenslander in Brisbane's Highgate Hill. Timothy Hill refers to these early houses as rehearsals in every way. The HH House does this on several levels. It uses unconventional materials. Tomato stakes (economical timber battens) are used to enclose areas, but still remain open and aerated, while irregular columns of rough and raw, off-form concrete create what Professor Philip Goad calls 'a monument to pleasingdecay'. With its modern day Venus de Milo sculpture perched on one of the concrete stacks, it is indeed an accurate description.

This notion of how buildings weather, gain patina and a rich mutable life is something of a preoccupation of the practice. Their next major project, the C House, was built between 1991 and 1998.

The blurring of lines between outdoor and indoor space makes sense in a climate where living outside most of the year is possible. A shallow pond separates the public living and dining area from the more private bathroom and bedrooms to the left.

Twelve years after its completion, Hill feels it has only now evolved to a point where its maturity meets their original intention through the weathering of materials and the evolving nature of the landscaping. The slow burn of the construction period was enabled by a client who acknowledged, 'I am using a Japanese timetable,' and savoured the expertise of a small, dedicated team. 'With the C House we were inventing a new kind of language and practising with tradespeople. While it was our most refined rendition it was also clearly the work of very young people because you can count off the tributes – Aalto, Scarpa, Lutyens and Schinkel,' says Hill.

Goad describes the house as an 'elaborate landscape of walls, steps, seats, ledges and a long narrow pool'. It plays with sequential spaces where scale is in flux, intimate areas give way to grand, materials transform from rough to smooth, and timber detailing from ceiling to sliding screen declares its bespoke nature.

Hill is at his most passionate when he speaks of Lutyens and his 'magic' with a plan. 'We are plan-fascinated – we are interested in organising the plan rather than decorating the pavilion,' he says. 'Lutyens orchestrated the house to have a sense of arrival at defended territory and he would over-sequence the approach to enlarge the scale of the house, which is something we do. He would also invent a site where there was none.' All this has tremendous resonance in the D House.

The D House is exceptional because it overtly engages with its urban context in a way that no other house represented in this book does. Privacy is almost always the goal, with a range of strategies applied, including the choice of remote sites, fortress-like approaches and plans that turn their backs on their surrounds. But then, to be fair, none was ever imagined as anything other than a domestic residence. The D House was always different in its intent.

'One of the great legacies of Queenslanders is, with their generic plan, they can adapt to business premises, and are easy to re-service because they are suspended off the ground,' says Hill. 'They have a series of rooms unlike today's fashion for "ki-di-lis"(kitchen/dining/living all in one space), which have little flexibility.' Queenslanders, he says, have been used this way in inner suburban Brisbane since World War II and so he was mindful, as much as anything, of 'building a good bit of urban infrastructure rather than simply tailoring a house for someone'.

As a practice, Donovan Hill seem to be masters at holding the future in their gaze while operating in the present. They plan for how their houses will weather and mature as much as for how their clients' lives will shift and the demands on the spaces they live in will alter. 'The main thing that happens to households is that they change. Mothers come to stay for extended periods of time, kids don't leave home but don't want to be down the same corridor as mum and dad, or someone loses their job and needs to work from home. We raise the notion that their investment might be more versatile if their household is more versatile. Then it starts to gel.'

Fortunately, Hill's long held view appealed to his client who was aware that, while a modest project, it represented the sum of her resources and so liked the idea that use wasn't limited to that of a house. 'She also liked it ethically that if you were going to the trouble to make a building, it really ought to have another use and that she could lease it to a business if circumstances required it.'

The D House is in the inner Brisbane suburb of New Farm and has been built on a small 310 square metre subdivision. It is, as Hill says unequivocally, 'a dud site with no view and so we needed to ramp up the value of what is actually outside'.

He also needed to re-create the physical terrain, which has been cut and filled, calibrated and manipulated, 'totally contrived to seem inevitable'.

Donovan Hill are advocates of built-in furniture, as shown in this corner of the living space. This was designed with practicality in mind – you can sweep under it, it can be a spare bed and has a certain lightness and transparency in a small space. Hill also designed the copper wall light above the window.

The entrance to the kitchen is illuminated by the skylight. This is Hill's technique of placing skylights where threshold decisions have to be made while also creating that sense of the sky, and its changing moods, in the deeper parts of the house. The white set plaster walls have a subtle patina that adds to the atmosphere.

To approach the house is to experience Lutyens' extended sequence. The taxi dropped me off at what looked like a garden wall (albeit with a beautifully crafted timber shutter) and the approach is made through a small grove of trees, passing along the length of the house (slightly elevated from the street) to arrive at a gate.

'The difference between a door and a gate sounds slight, and looks slighter on the plan, but it makes for a graduated entrance as it means you have arrived at the territory before you have arrived at the house,' says Hill. While I had no conscious appreciation of these strategies, there is no denying that it is extremely effective in setting up expectation by allowing visual slices of interior life to be seen and different physicality to be experienced, from the rise in the ground to the changes of light under the trees.

The idea of the garden wall helped Hill's concept for the house in a couple of ways. 'Homes often have atmosphere when they are a conversion of something else, a warehouse, for example, and it is hard to be the author of something initially. I needed a conceptual tool to get it moving. So I thought of the house as an enormous garden terrace with a tarpaulin over it and that permitted me to think about the things that weren't "housey".'

In negotiations with council he also argued that a pleasing garden wall would add to the street appeal, that there was precedence in the area, and that the apparent absence of a roof would allow the roofs of surrounding houses to provide the edge to sky, giving deference to the existing buildings. Two years of debate still ensued.

This small two-bedroom (200 square metre) house is in three zones – the main living area, with its shifting degrees of public/private life; the kitchen, positioned behind a masonry wall and part of the interior corridor spanning the length of the house; and the private area consisting of two bedrooms, a large bathroom and a spacious laundry/storage room.

'The house is planned very much like a piece of townscape. The main room is like the footpath because as you are moving up and down in the house, exactly parallel to the footpath, you have the sense that we are all in the network,' says Hill. And he should know. He moved in as a lodger in 2000 and delights in the fact that while not a chiropractor or therapist using the building, he does at least qualify as 'non-traditional family use'. Hence he knows the house intimately. 'If I am working here, what I like to do is open it up and it becomes my office – I am with the world and it is a working day. If I am here by myself or the base household of two, it is often closed but as soon as friends come over, we open it up and it becomes a setting for events.'

Hence the window and its timber shutter help define mood and activity. As the only window in the building, it has a sense of consequence, enhanced by Hill's 'fiddling with proportion'. Despite its length of 3400 mm, it is only 1800 mm high and it makes a huge difference that it is set low in the wall. 'The Japanese and Chinese reduce the height leading into a courtyard. This act of synthesising from other cultures is a professional obligation. We only have the vernacular here and that is colonial.'

Hill's other preoccupation is a quest for atmosphere. Friends who have visited this house enthuse about it and, I suspect, it is partly because it has managed to capture this elusive quality. Hill's philosophy, born of practicality and planning, is that a sense of 'unevenness' creates character and hence atmosphere. 'This house is part fibro shack and part Italian marble. Some parts tighten up to be almost too small (some doorways are 450 mm wide) while other doors are massive and oversized,' he says. So large is mixed with small, rough with smooth, refined with coarse, expensive with cheap. 'Even the construction is uneven with the shell of the building put up by a merchant contractor and the refined detail executed by another.'

Atmosphere is also about the manipulation of light and plays of perception around exterior and interior. Above the window is a small skylight, which causes the interior wall to become light, like an exterior wall, not shadowy like an interior one. There is another large skylight above the threshold where 'there are a lot of decisions to make' and hence the need for illumination. One of those decisions is, quite literally, where to put your feet. While the ceiling is one great 'tarpaulin' of oiled hardwood timbers, the floor is, in part, a mosaic of materials and textures made up of travertine, pebbles, solid timber and slatted timber. Hill explained that there is often a confidence in walking in interior spaces that is not true of exterior ones – hence the idea of creating a heightened awareness of the ground. 'This was one way of linking the building with the landscape. You have to plan where to put your feet, to map it like in landscape, and that slight hesitation comes from outside.'

The climate in Brisbane is hot and wet, and so the degree of openness befits the conditions. As light and surfaces mix up external/internal messaging so does the plan of the indoor/outdoor spaces. The main room is glazed at either end, extending the sense of space to courtyards open to the sky at one end and forming a significant outdoor room at the other. 'By offering the sky to the deep interior, it creates another type of transparency and connects it to shifts in light and hence to what is happening outside.' This lightness of being is further enhanced by the spare use of furnishings and, in particular, the built-in sofa with its lack of heavy base, allowing the eye to travel through to the courtyard beyond. Stools are used as side tables and shelves are designed for the curated objects and paintings that are propped on them with consummate casualness. In the early days, before the domestic nature of the building was declared with a post box and number, a woman passed her card through the window asking if they would give her a call when they got more stock in.

With the potential for uses other than that of a home (a consulting room, for instance), the bedrooms can be independently accessed. The influence of Japan is evident in the serenity of the fish pond and the sliding screen door to the bedroom. The wall of glazed tiles changes with the effects of light throughout the day.

The mix of materials – timber, tiles and concrete – illustrates the skill of mixing raw and crafted.

The private rooms at the back of the house, which are used as bedrooms, have considerable thought given to the ventilation and light sources. Doors in the corners of one room allow access, light, ventilation and a large opening to the courtyard. The other bedroom, with a large screen providing privacy, opens directly onto the outdoor courtyard with all the charm of a Japanese water garden. 'I had always rented dumpy old houses on the river, which can be big and blustery, and I wondered how it would feel to do the Japanese thing and miniaturise it,' says Hill.

He is a great advocate of the laundry/storage room. He feels it not only helps them keep house but also avoids the tyranny of endless cupboards becoming the dominant feature of the interior. It is typical of the approach to many things about the D House. It is a rethinking of how we live, placing priorities accordingly. Deciding what values are important and what are not. Asking how a building can make provision for future use and where the emphasis of labour and cost should be applied. Looking to provide comfort, be conscious of climate and create atmosphere. Exploring how to be private and still engage with the world. In Timothy Hill's words, 'This is what design is. Trying to account for the tremendous consequence of things that aren't aesthetic.' And in doing what his tutor Brit Andresen taught him – to look towards what it means to people, and not merely how it looks – the aesthetic has emerged in a most profound sense. While it is clearly the product of tremendous thoughtfulness the effect is of that most sought after, but rarely achieved quality – the seemingly casual.

The plan of the house shows the use made of what Hill describes as a 'dud' site.

Donovan Hill's search for the 'seemingly casual' extends to the way in which furniture items are placed throughout the house. Again there is that 'high/low' mix, the juxtaposition of the unexpected and the exquisite placement of books and ceramics.

DETAILS THE D HOUSE

PLASTERED WALL The way in which materials change, and the patina they gain, is an important consideration for the Donovan Hill aesthetic. Materials are honest and unadorned: the ceiling is a local hardwood that has been oiled and the floors concrete with untreated travertine inserts. This white set plaster wall was the work of a plasterer who had never used it before, but Hill acknowledges 'its wacky patina sort of works'. The shaft of sunlight comes from one of several skylights that throw light into key areas and 'offer the sky to the deep interior'.

GATED ENTRY With conventional thinking turned on its head in so many ways in the D House, it is more than appropriate that there isn't a front door in the traditional sense. The emphasis here is on the approach to the house, which requires one to walk, under the dappled shade of a grove of tuckeroo trees, along the façade of the house, and parallel to the street, to a gate. This serves to graduate the entrance and in Hill's words 'elongate the sequence'. It also creates a sense of expectation, as it is impossible not to look into the main living room through the open shutter.

DOORS  One of the key considerations in the house was to create atmosphere through an 'uneven' application of skills, materials and a play of scale – mixing big with small, rough with smooth and refined with coarse. Some doorways tighten up to be only 450 mm wide while others become expansive and oversized. There are also decisions about where dollars deliver the best outcome. In the instance of these doors Hill designed cut-out openings instead of door handles and put the money into expensive door seals, which give a cushioned sense of luxury.

FLOORING MATERIALS The mix of materials is most evident on the ground, especially at the threshold of the interior space. There is a meeting of travertine, pebbles, solid timber and slatted timber, which forms a very conscious floor surface arrangement to denote the movement from one space to another. The intention is to bring an awareness of the ground, which one has when walking in the landscape, into a domestic interior. 'You have to plan where to put your feet, and that hesitation is associated with being outside,' says Hill.

TIMBER SCREEN The window that runs 3400 mm along the façade of the house is both the biggest and the only window. That it also links with the outside world gives it a sense of consequence. Internally there are door openings, large sections of glazing and skylights, but no other windows. The timber screen is easy to gradate – it can be completely closed for privacy or completely open when the occupants are socialising with friends. When Hill is working at home, the living room becomes his office and the screen is open to denote that he is part of the wider world.

DISPLAY SHELVES  Anathema to Hill is the predisposition of contemporary houses for the dominance of walls of cupboards, particularly where they are used to stylise the room. His preference is for a large laundry/storage room, which, he says, 'helps us keep house'. For him, it is about the judgment of how space should be used and, in this house, there is a clear divide between the functional and the beautiful. And there is always a place for the beautiful. Artworks are curated and propped on the shelves designed for that purpose, and groups of ceramics are carefully placed. It is no wonder the house has been mistaken for a gallery.
1999–2000 THE WARDLE HOUSE
JOHN WARDLE

The house is on an elevated site between three elm trees. Clearly visible when photographed in winter, the double height wall of suspended glass is skewed towards the city view and presents an 'open face' to the street.

The cladding for the extension uses black oiled messmate fixed in a board and batten arrangement.

'I AM ALWAYS MORE ATTRACTED TO THE MORE COMPLEX, EVEN IF FLAWED, BUILDING, RATHER THAN THE SIMPLE AND BEAUTIFULLY EXECUTED.' JOHN WARDLE

The living space is a place for Wardle's artworks and sculptures, such as a cardboard telescope by longterm staff member Andrew Wong.

From the front door, a turn to the right leads to the new section of the house. The translucent panels of fibreglass separating the stairwell from the hallway have a luminous quality when sunlit.

ARCHITECT JOHN WARDLE IS SOMETHING OF a paradox. He admits (according to his children) if he were being schooled today, he would be pumped full of Ritalin to maintain his concentration span beyond three minutes. Yet it is this almost constant curiosity about everything that drives and shapes his personality and, in turn, his architectural practice.

He is also endearingly blunt about what he cannot do. At university he 'made a couple of surfboards...and made them so badly that it was one of my moments of reckoning, where I learnt as an architect to have regard for the skills of others'. It is his ability to harness the skills of others that has become a defining element of his work. It takes an immense understanding and depth of knowledge to know how to integrate the skills of craftspeople, artisans and artists successfully into a building. 'For me, it is about testing and pushing the level of that skill base, be it an incredible bit of brickwork, a delicate piece of steel or a complex technological process using concrete.'

Part of Wardle's distinctive architectural language is formed by the new outcomes he creates when challenging an existing understanding of craft and its processes. 'By knowing a lot about something you can then have the confidence to push beyond convention. For example, a confidence comes from knowing how to bend steel on a bench press and to what degree, and how you can radius it – in knowing, we can push the performance of a material.'

While Wardle is at pains to avoid gratuitous Freudian connections between his childhood and his present profession, there are some significant links. He grew up in Geelong (one hour south of Melbourne) where his father, an agricultural scientist interested in history and houses with views, 'was always building things, particularly substantial gardens. He was friendly with Ken Burns, the local demolition contractor. While philosophically poles apart, they would spend Saturday mornings talking about the latest Geelong building (many of them significant) that Ken had demolished. The rudimentary stuff of reclaimed materials was scattered all over the yard but there were massive industrial sheds where Ken stored all the precious bits – the finials, panelling, windows, cabinetry and staircases – the bits where the human touch was evident. I would spend hours in this Aladdin's cave of ornaments and marvelled at the detail,' says Wardle.

Gardens and the broader aspect of the relationship of inside and out is a preoccupation for Wardle, who studied horticulture at Burnley part time for three years while working at his first post-degree job at Cocks & Carmichael Architects. Later, when he launched John Wardle Architects, some of the firm's earliest commissions were garden projects. But it was the family preoccupation with views that had the biggest impact. It's evident in his work on the Hawke Building for the University of South Australia, in which he looked at the Adelaide city plan to ascertain view lines and their visibility within the chamber of the building; and again in Melbourne Grammar, where the Year 12 boys' study room cantilevers out towards the city to symbolically 'herald their move into the world'. It's there, too, in the South Yarra House, where the one main strategy was for the house to act as a conduit for channelling broad views of the Yarra River and the tight urban views towards the city.

'It's generally not about views from the window's edge, it's about sequencing the view and drawing that back into the house,' he says. 'We question how far back we can draw that view. I'll often talk about the layering of a house, setting the rooms on their longitudinal axis and having cross axial members retractable so that the views are brought right back into the structure of the house.' In essence, a long space would be segmented with sliding doors or screens so that even from deep within the building the view can be enjoyed or closed off at will.

The living area and dining room in the original part of the house. The window echoes the proportions of the table. The outlook is carefully considered with window openings framing city, garden or pool views.

The house is a mixture of natural tones and textures with 'small intense splashes' of colour.

The curve of the acoustic panels draws you into the formal living area at the front of the house. Wardle designed the cabinet, A Music Stand for a Middle Child, as part of his master's degree at RMIT. For him it symbolises his many and varied architectural preoccupations and was conceived with this space in mind.

In tandem with this concept is Wardle's concern with extrusion or the elongation of space along the longitudinal axis – a 'stretching' of the house plan so that space is exaggerated. Important to Wardle is the 'elegance of elongated space', and when you see his extraordinary sketches, it is clear where volumes have been squeezed and where they have been drawn out to achieve this.

The firm had been going for seven years doing mainly extensions and renovations before it received its first commission for a whole house. 'The Kitamura House (1993–96) was pivotal for us,' says Wardle. 'The sculptor and friend Akio Makigawa insisted that the client take me on.' For Wardle, the engagement with the client is everything and is one of the distinctive aspects of the practice. 'I think we have a particular way of dealing with clients that comes out of our residential experience.'

Conversations are recorded and questions asked; often, more information is required than clients are used to giving. To Wardle, it is part of the 'process of human engagement' and results in buildings that have a deep personal connection to their owners. During one recorded conversation, the artist clients of the Diamond Bay House (2005) discussed at length the National Gallery of Victoria, and so a dramatic arch became the defining feature of their interior in response to the primary elevation of the NGV. It is, in Wardle's words, 'a teasing out of stories'. At the completion of a project he often designs a piece of joinery as a summary of the architect-client relationship. For the same couple he designed a white cantilevered cabinet that appears to be sawn in half to contain his and hers personal drawers, symbolising their respective personalities. Hers had no visible handle (hard to open up) but had a beautiful undulating green interior. His, on the other hand, had an oversized handle (easy to access) but was painted the hottest electric pink and contained a jagged, aggressive interior. As Wardle says, 'This cabinet tells much about our relationship over the course of the project and appears to be greatly appreciated as a consequence.'

Wardle is fond of analogies. He describes his practice's award-winning weekender, the Balnarring Beach House (1994–97), as 'a suitcase that "unpacks"when the clients arrive, using a series of sliding glazed screens that extend the interior into the decking, then into the vegetation'. So whether in micro, a witty piece of joinery that encapsulates clients' exterior and interior life, or in macro, a full-blown house that also responds internally and externally to its site and usage, Wardle is using the same conceptual framework.

But it would be wrong to assume that he has a set architectural box of tricks to draw on. As part of the design process, Wardle embraces uncertainty and searches persistently for 'the right line' as a writer might search for the right word. 'I don't offer certainty too early in the process. I am, by nature, an uncertain person and I like the kind of constant enquiry that comes with being less immediately certain about an outcome,' he says. The design development phase is when the practice is at its most fertile. He refers at length to the coalition of the other creative contributors within his practice. One has the sense that Wardle's strength as an architect comes from being able to give time to the development of ideas, a time where potential can be explored and tested, and the 'flux of an imprecise process' relished and enjoyed. Combine this with his ability to seek out creative and sometimes unexpected solutions, through partnerships with craftspeople, artists and skilled technicians, and the unique nature of the work becomes apparent. As Leon Van Schaik points out in his 'Essay on some works of John Wardle Architects', 'A work of JWA should properly have a superscript of credits scrolling down and endlessly accounting for the roles of all these people...down to the equivalent of "Gaffer"and "Best Boy".Because these are all named members of the Director's team. And when they are brought on to play their parts in a fully controlled way, we have John Wardle Architects.'

And it is no different when it comes to Wardle's own house: weavers, steel fabricators, specialist joiners, stonemasons, fibreglass manufacturers, tree surgeons, acousticians and Nauruan concreters all had a part to play.

The house, in the Melbourne suburb of Kew, was not for sale, just unoccupied, when Wardle noticed it on a drive-by. Not surprisingly, the first thing he observed was its fabulous, but unexploited, city views. The house was a modest residence designed in 1951 by Melbourne architect Horace Tribe (who designed Melbourne's first kindergarten buildings) and while Wardle noted its interesting floor plan, there was little else to recommend it. He and his wife, Susan, and three children lived in the existing house for three years before stage one of renovations started in 1993. This created a larger kitchen and two bathrooms in the middle section of the house. It was the major additions to the house in 1999, however, that turned it into an award-winning building. In 2000 the Wardle House won the RAIA National Award for Interior Architecture.

The view may have attracted Wardle to the site, but it was the three massive elm trees on the property that shaped the scheme, quite literally. 'I engaged a tree surgeon to advise how close I could get to the roots without harming the trees, and once the root zone was mapped, the form of the house developed between.'

To emphasise the relationship of the house to the trees, two windows on the east and west side of the new elevation, one metre wide and running the entire two-storey height, align with each trunk. There is no mistaking the significance of their relationship to the structure.

Working around the trees demanded unconventional thinking when it came to excavation, and it was the engineer who came up with the plan of adopting swimming pool construction techniques. The team worked in winter when the trees were dormant, pruning the roots with a massive radial saw that allowed the earth to be removed with extraordinary precision. 'We then sprayed the sides with concrete, forming it up like a swimming pool and so the whole house sits on a massive subterranean concrete frame,' says Wardle.

Not only have the trees influenced the form and the construction methods but have also inspired the textural nature and colour of the cladding. Wardle notes that 'rather than use fabulous materials, we try and work fabulously with rudimentary materials', and for his own house he approached the Timber Promotion Council to source a managed Victorian hardwood, messmate ( _Eucalyptus obliqua_ ), for the façade. He then designed a system of board and batten cladding, arranged in a repeating pattern of two small battens and one large batten. 'It is all there for a reason. The blackened textured timber treatment refers to the vocabulary of the craggy bark of the Scottish elm trees,' he says. Keen to avoid any visible nail or screw heads on the façade, and to mimic the invisible joints of the best traditional cabinetmaking, Wardle devised a seamless technique of gaskets and internal stainless steel fixings that also allowed the boards (some of which face west) to expand and contract. While an elegant visual solution, it was slow, intense and expensive. He joked to the Timber Promotion Council that his system was perfect for their promotion in China – 'cheap material but, boy, did it soak up a lot of labour'.

It may well be too obvious to observe, but the size, shape and seasonal changes of the trees themselves in turn provide a setting for the house that anchors it in a meaningful context. The house would still be beautiful without the trees, and vice versa, but it is the combination of the two, and the visual links Wardle has created between them, that makes the majesty of both all the more apparent.

The other defining feature is the massive two-storey window wall, which illustrates some of Wardle's preoccupations. 'When you look up from the street, it looks as though it has been sliced open to reveal the patterns of its interior,' says Wardle. While this treatment could suggest a certain rawness of approach, the balance between the exposure of the integrity of the structure and the subtle polish of its execution gives it a powerful elegance.

The other aspect of his work exemplified here is the 'mannered cut'. When you look at the plan for this section you will see the way in which the wall on the northern side pushes forward to dramatically skew the windows to the south towards the city view.

While passersby might stop and stare into the new glass-fronted elevation, the access to the house is less obvious. Up a stairway of broad bluestone steps, reclaimed from the forecourt of BHP House, and at the end of the curve of the timber cladding is the front door. Once inside, a turn left draws you past the glowing ochre fibreglass sheets (which shield the staircase), and leads to the common areas of kitchen, dining and family living; a turn right directs you towards the formal living room and much lauded views. A staircase leads to a study and master bedroom, which sit directly above the formal sitting room, divided by a slender void that aligns with one of the elm tree windows.

In family and formal rooms alike, the exterior spaces (and their appreciation from within the house) are carefully considered. There is something of the Japanese art of 'managed views', whether onto a pool, a plant or an urban vista, that the house design maximises. It's a finely crafted interior but avoids feeling overwrought and over-designed. This is in most part due to the nature of the materials – timber, wicker, warmly toned fibreglass and steel – and the way in which Wardle has chosen to use them. The jury for the 2000 RAIA Interior Award summed up by saying, 'The interior is a masterwork of considered function, intricate detail, crafted finish and rational stacking.' It is also grounded because it is above all a family home with art and books, furniture, collections and artefacts.

Wardle is a collector. Having just returned from a trip to Ljubljana, he enthuses about the work of architect Joze Plecnik and the quality of the city's Sunday flea market, in equal measure. The house makes room for his acquisitions – for instance, a groove in a shelf is designed to house a massive eighteenth century organ maker's tuning tool – and what can't be accommodated goes to his family's house on Bruny Island.

Wardle's interest in sculptural furniture, whether from another designer or objects of his own creation such as the low timber table, are a dominant theme. The window lines up with the elm on this side of the room and is repeated on the other wall, so that the relationship of the tree trunks and the building is evident.

The tree, the water and the organic elegance of Wardle's manmade solutions illustrate how the house is defined by its relationship to nature.

One of the most striking objects in the house is a substantial and complex piece of joinery, _A Music Stand for a Middle Child_ , which Wardle constructed as part of his masters degree at RMIT. 'I had always tended to work constantly and rapidly without recording the process,' he says. 'The process of studying the masters was reflective and took me out of the day-to-day headspace of the practice and allowed me to question what motivated me, how I worked and explored ideas. It was also an experience shared with other members of the practice as it qualified much of the language of our discussions. The cabinet was constructed for my presentation to the examiners and the exhibition, and still summarises all the points I made then – the mannered cuts, frayed ends, longitudinal priority, extended space, moving parts, the elevation, the whimsy that we take very seriously.'

A few years later in the design of the Vineyard House (2001–04), Wardle draws on the analogy of grafting new vines onto old in his planning approach to the building, and yet this is exactly what he has done with his own home.

In the book, this is the only renovation, albeit a significant one, and this is a testament to Wardle's ability to seamlessly join old and new, and illustrates the art of balance and counterbalance, intuition and ingenuity he brings to all his work.

DETAILS THE WARDLE HOUSE

ENTRANCE The entrance sits on the cusp of the old and the new section of the house. Accessed via wide steps of bluestone, reclaimed from the forecourt of Melbourne's BHP House, the journey from street level to the entrance allows time to admire the timber cladding that encases the addition to the house.

Working in a Victorian hardwood, messmate, Wardle designed a system of board and batten cladding that concealed screw and nail heads. Both the texture and the black stain link to the trunks of the huge elms that define the house in concept and execution.

FJORD CHAIR The asymmetrical and softly facetted nature of Patricia Urquiola's Fjord Relax armchair from 2002 is a perfect fit with Wardle's interest in geometry. Urquiola's sculptural chair creates dramatically different shapes when viewed from different angles due to its high partial back and single arm combination. Urquiola's ability to appropriate and integrate traditional crafts into her design aesthetic parallels that of Wardle. The bright fuchsia coloured Take a Line for a Walk chair by Alfredo Häberli in the lounge area, and the Fjord are both manufactured by avant garde Italian company Moroso.

A MASTER'S WORK  Sitting in front of a curved wall of acoustic panels is the phenomenal work that Wardle produced as part of his master's degree at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). Enigmatically named A Music Stand for a Middle Child, this crafted cabinet sums up his architectural preoccupations, including the 'whimsy that we take very seriously'. The significance of the line to Wardle is symbolically eked out in the front panel, and the lime coloured drawers that extrude from the side illustrate his interest in the elongation and exaggeration of form.

MAIN BEDROOM The parents' quarters are at the top of the house with the bed positioned to take in the impressive city views beyond the enormous glass curtain wall. Behind the bedhead is a sliding wall that can be closed for privacy or opened to the study area behind. The balustrade in wicker shows Wardle's interest in bringing a level of craft into the home. If anything, the house is celebrated for the intensity of the attention to detail and the feeling that whatever skill best suits his desired outcomes, it will be employed to full effect.

TIMBER From the macro to the micro, the principles Wardle applies are consistent. As a perpetual collector, he maintains an enthusiasm for found objects such as an organ tuner's tool he houses in a small purpose-made indent in a shelf. This sculptural coffee table (as seen from above) sits in the formal living room adjacent to the sofa. Designed by Wardle, it has a place for nibbles and drinks. Sections are removable and functional yet it is made in that signature Wardle fashion where the beauty is derived from the dynamic created by almost fitting – but not quite.

DISPLAY SHELF  Running the entire length of the window in the formal living room is a deep timber shelf to provide an area where Wardle can display his collections of interesting objects and artworks in small considered groups. The shelf serves another purpose – one of privacy. He recalls during the building of the house positioning each of his three children along the street and standing on the open edge as his wife, Susan, sat on a paint can so that he could calibrate the exact angle where the shelf would obscure someone sitting on a low sofa in the middle of the room.
BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL

Adlercreutz, Gunnel, Stutchbury, Peter and Leplastrier, Richard (essays) _Spirit of Nature of Wood Architecture Award 2004_ , Building Information Ltd, Helsinki, 2004

Andresen, Brit, A.S. Hook Address, 2002 RAIA Gold Medallist

'Architectural Steel Innovation with Blue Scope Steel', _Steel Profile_ No 96, September 2006

Beck, Haig, and Cooper, Jackie, 'On Andresen & O'Gorman's Stradbroke Island House', _UME_ , Edition 3, 1997

Blunck, Reiner, 'Il Clima Padrone', _Abitare_ , Edition 265, 1988

Blythe, Richard, 'A Terroir of Terroir (or, a brief history of design-places), Architecture and Design, RMIT, 2009

Daab, _Australia Architecture & Design_, daab gmbh, 2007

Donovan Hill D House, Brisbane. _UME_ , Edition 15, 2002

Drew, Philip, _Peter Stutchbury_ , Pesaro Architectural Monographs, Pesaro Publishing, Sydney, 2000

Evans, Doug, _Kevin Borland: Architecture from the Heart_ , RMIT University Press, Melbourne, 2007

Fromonot, Francoise, _Glenn Murcutt: Works and Projects_ , Thames & Hudson, London, 1995

Fromonot, Francoise, _Jørn Utzon_ , _The Sydney Opera House_ , Gingko Press Inc, California, 1998

Giannini, Eli, 'About Face', _Architectural Review Australia_ , Residential 2000

Goad, Philip, 'Grafts and Crafts', _Architecture Australia_ , July/August 2004

Goad, Philip, _Melbourne Architecture_ , The Watermark Press, Sydney, 1999

Goad, Philip and Bingham-Hall, Patrick, _New Directions in Australian Architecture_ , Pesaro Publishing, 2001

Goad, Philip (introduction by Glenn Murcutt, _Troppo_ , Pesaro Architectural Monographs, Pesaro Publishing, Sydney, 2005

Hayes, Babette, and Hersey, April, _Australian Style_ , Paul Hamlyn, London and Sydney, 1970

Hyatt, Peter, _Local Heroes, Architects of Australia's Sunshine Coast_ , Craftsman House, G+B Arts International, Sydney, 2000

Jackson, Davina, and Johnson, Chris, _Australian Architecture Now_ , Thames & Hudson, London, 2000

Jackson, Davina, 'House Boys', _Vogue Living_ , November 1990

Jahn, Graham, _Contemporary Australian Architecture_ , Gordon and Breach Arts International, Sydney, 1994

Jahn, Graham, _Sydney Architecture_ , The Watermark Press, Sydney, 1997

James, Barbara, and Harris, Phil, 'The Sanctuary', _Architecture Australia_ , March/April 1999

Johnson, Anna, 'Sea Shell', _Monument_ , No 78

Kennedy, Ken, 'Into the Light', _Monument_ , Vol 1, No 4, 1994

Leplastrier, Richard, A.S. Hook Address, 1999 RAIA Gold Medallist

Lewis, Jim, 'The Native Builder', _The New York Times_ , May 20, 2007

McNeill, Barry and Woolley, Leigh, _Architecture from the Edge_ , Montpelier Press, Hobart, 2002

Mainwaring, John, 'Air & Rhythm', _Architecture Australia_ , September/October 1998

Margalit, Harry and Goad, Philip, _Durbach Block: The Luminous Space of Abstraction_ , Pesaro Architectural Monographs, Pesaro Publishing, Sydney, 2001

'Marshall, Barrie: Marshall House, Kitty Millers Bay, Phillip Island', _UME_ in a box. Box 1, Portfolio 3, 1992

Michell, George, 'Ruthless Elegance', _Architecture Australia_ , July/August 1997

_Mooloomba House_ , Timber Research Unit, School of Architecture, University of Tasmania

Murcutt, Glenn, A. S. Hook Address, 1992 RAIA Gold Medallist

O'Donnell, Marcus, 'Success without a Price', _Monument_ , No 16

Paroissien, Leon and Griggs, Michael (ed.), _Old Continent New Building: Contemporary Australian Architecture_ , David Ell Press in association with the Design Arts Committee of the Australia Council, 1983

Perren, Claudia and Ring, Kristien (ed.), _Australian Architecture: Living the Modern_ , Hatje Cantz, 2007

Poole, Gabriel, A.S. Hook Address, 1998 RAIA Gold Medallist

Quarry, Neville, _Award Winning Australian Architecture_ , Craftsman House in association with G+B Arts International, 1997

Reinmuth, Gerard (ed.), 'Tasmanian Modern: Then & Now.' _Architectural Review Australia_ , No 74, 2001

Robin Boyd Award for Residential Buildings; Jury Verdict, _Architecture Australia_ , November/December 2001

Stewart, Kate, 'Sheer Brilliance', _Interiors_ , April/May 2003

Stuckey, Helen, '3 Projects', _Transition,_ Issue 43, RMIT, 1994

Stutchbury, Peter, and Spence, Rory, 'Architecture & Place', _Architecture Australia_ , January/February 1999

Tanner, Howard, _Australian Housing in the Seventies_ , Ure Smith, Sydney, 1975

Taylor, Jennifer, _Australian Architecture Since 1960_ , National Education Division, Royal Australian Institute of Architects

Tonkin Peter, 'Stradbroke Space Farm', _Architecture Australia_ , March/April 1998

van Schaik, Leon, _Design City Melbourne_ , Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester, UK, 2006

van Schaik, Leon et al., _Volume: John Wardle Architects_ , Thames & Hudson, London, 2008

Walker, Bruce, _Gabriel Poole – space in which the soul can play_ , Visionary Press, Australia, 1998

Wallace, Miranda and Stutchbury, Sarah (ed.), _Place Makers – Contemporary Queensland Architects_ , Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2008

_Ken Woolley and Ancher Mortlock & Woolley_, The Master Architect Series, IV, The Images Publishing Group, Melbourne, 1999

_Art Works: Drawings by Ken Woolle_ y, The Images Publishing Group, Melbourne, 2003

Woolley, Ellen, and Tonkin, Peter, 'Obituary; Peter O'Gorman', _Architecture Australia_ , January/February 2002

Woolley, Ken, A.S. Hook Address, 1993 RAIA Gold Medallist

ONLINE REFERENCES

www.dentoncorkermarshall.com

www.amwarchitects.com.au

www.gabrielpoole.com.au

www.woodmarsh.com.au

www.durbachblock.com

www.seangodsell.com

www.peterstutchbury.com.au

www.donovanhill.com.au

www.johnwardlearchitects.com

www.pettitandsevitt.com.au

www.exero.com/mastergate/secured/design/wooley.htm, 'Nationalism...never been a good source of good art'.

www.architecture.com.au, Australian Institute of Architects, Tribute to Ms Andresen by Lisa Findley

www.rmit.edu.au, RMIT, Modern in Melbourne

www.theage.com.au, 'No guts, no glory' _The Age_ , September 2003. Words by Lisa Bragge

www.abc.net.au, 'In the Mind of the Architect'

www.ozetecture.org, Architecture Foundation Australia portfolio, Brit Andresen, Glenn Murcutt, Richard Leplastrier

<http://www.lablog.org.uk/wp-content/060327-casi-studio.pdf>

<http://www.architecture.com.au/i-cms?page=6712>

20th Century Buildings for National Estate Register - Tasmania - Australian Institute of Architects

<http://www.dpcd.vic.gov.au/heritage/admin/file/content2/c7/Post_war_study_Stage1_Vol2_ResidentialG.pdf>

<http://www.terroir.com.au>

CREDITS

'Sydney Opera House roof geometry', David Moore © Estate of David Moore

'Sun patterns within the Sydney Opera House podium', David Moore © Estate of David Moore

Photographed by Michael Viney

Photographed by Martyn Thompson

Photographed by Patrick Bingham-Hall

Photographed by John Gollings

Photographed by Max Dupain, courtesy of Ancher Mortlock & Woolley

Photographed by John Gollings

Photographed by Ross Honeysett, courtesy of Engelen Moore

Artwork by Jack Britten

Artwork by Dale Frank and Bill Henson

Artwork by Guo Jian

Artwork by Akaram Zaatari

Artwork by Darren Wardle and Akaram Zaatari

Artwork by Ingo Kleinert

Artwork by Jeremiah Bonson

Artwork by Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Stieg Persson (2), Melinda Harper and Fran O'Neill

Artwork by Carmel Seymour

Artwork by R. Schuurmans-Medek, Laura Frances, Peter Harding and Chris Battersby

Artwork by Boxer Milner

Artwork by Julia Ritson

Artwork by Gareth Sansom

Artwork by Louise Forthum

Artwork by Tim Maguire

Thanks to Anibou, Space Furniture, Corporate Culture, Dinosaur Designs and A4 Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

Author photograph by Prue Ruscoe
INDEX

A

  * Aalto, Alvar
  *  Alvar Aalto medal
  * _Abitare_
  * Aboriginal Australians
  * A.E. Brookes Travelling Scholarship
  * _Age, The_
  * _Age, The_ Small Homes Service
  *  Alexander, Christopher
  * Allen House, Dayboro
  * Allen Jack + Cottier
  * Ancher Mortlock Murray and Woolley
  * Ando, Tadao
  * Andresen, Brit
  *  Mooloomba House, North Stradbroke Island
  *  Andrews, Gordon
  * Andrews, John
  * Andrews, Mary
  * Appleby, Gordon
  * _Architecture Australia_
  * _Arts and Architecture_
  * Ashton Raggatt McDougal
  * Athan House, Monbulk
  * Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
  * Australian Embassy, Beijing
  * Australian Embassy, Tokyo
  * Australian Institute of Architects _see_ Royal Australian Institute of Architects
  * _Australian Women's Weekly, The_
  * Avarte

B

  * Barragán, Luis
  * Bell, Guilford
  * Bell, Minette and Bill
  * Beni Carr Glynn Burnett
  * Benjamin House, Longueville
  * Bijvoet, Bernard
  * Biltmoderne
  * Block, Camilla _see also_ Durbach Block
  * Blunck, Reiner
  * Blythe, Richard
  * Borland & Brown Architects
  * Borland, Kevin
  *  _Kevin Borland, Architecture from the Heart_ (Evans)
  * Boyd, Robin
  * Brenton, Bill
  * Breuer, Marcel
  * Broadfield, Jeffrey
  * Brown, Bernard
  * Burnett House, Darwin
  * Burns, Ken
  * Burrell Museum, Glasgow
  * Byera Hadley Scholarship

C

  * C House
  * Cadbury-Brown, Jim
  * Californian Case Study
  * Carter/Tuck house
  * Case Study Houses
  * Chamberlin, Powell and Bon
  * Chapman House
  * Chareau, Pierre
  * Chasers (nightclub)
  * Chen, Kai _see also_ Robinson Chen career
  *  Hildebrand House, Somers
  * Choong House, Eltham
  * City Square, Melbourne
  * Clare, Kerry and Lindsay
  * Clarke, Rolly
  * Clerehan, Neil
  * climate control
  * Clyde Cameron College, Wodonga
  * Cocks & Carmichael Architects
  * Collin, Bob
  * Colombo, Joe
  * Colvin House
  * Commercial Union Tower, London
  * concrete
  *  Ctesiphon system
  *  forms
  * _Concrete Poetry_ (Rollo)
  * _Contemporary Australian Architecture_ (Jahn)
  * Corker, Bill
  * Corlett, Peter
  * Corrigan, Peter
  * Cox, Philip
  * Cox Architects
  * Curry House
  * Curry House
  * Cyclone Tracy

D

  * D House, New Farm, Brisbane
  *  siting of
  * Dalbet
  * Dalton, John
  * Daphne House
  * Darling Point House
  * Darwin (NT)
  * Davidson, Bill
  * Davis House, Darlinghurst
  * Day, Norman
  * Day, Penny
  * DCM (Denton Corker Marshall)
  * de Chirico
  * Deconstructionism
  * Deer Park (tourist lodge)
  * Denton, John
  * Denton Corker Marshall
  * Department of Child Safety, Queensland
  * Diamond Bay House
  * Dobie House, Buderim Mountain
  * Donovan, Brian
  * Donovan Hill
  *  D House, New Farm, Brisbane
  * Drake, Gordon
  * Drew, Philip
  * Dreyer Foundation Prize of Honour
  * Droga, Daniel and Lyndal
  * Droga Apartment, Surry Hills
  *  beginning of project
  * Durbach, Neil
  * Durbach Block
  *  Droga Apartment, Surry Hills
  * _Durbach Block_ (monograph)
  * Dysart, Michael

E

  * Eames
  * Edmond, Maggie
  * Edmond & Corrigan
  * Einfeld Apartment
  * Ellwood, Craig
  * Exeter Library, New Hampshire

F

  * Faraday House, Carlton
  * Farnsworth House
  * Feltex House
  * Fjord chairs
  * Flynn, Errol
  * Flynn school
  * Fosters House, Buderim
  * Fulton, Barry
  * Future Shack

G

  * _GA_
  * Gartner House, Mount Tamborine
  * Gasson, Barry
  * Gazzard, Don
  * Gehry, Frank
  * Gibson, Robin
  * Giralang school
  * Glass House, Castlecrag
  * Gloster, Michael
  * Gloster House
  * Goad, Philip
  * Godsell, David
  * Godsell, Jack
  * Godsell, Sean
  *  Godsell Associates
  *  Kew House
  * Golden Lane Estate, London
  * Gollings, John
  * Gollins Melvin Ward & Partners
  * Goodman House, Middle Cove
  * Gottlieb, Joe and Pesa
  * Gottlieb House, Caulfield
  * Graceville House
  * Green Can house, Darwin
  * Grounds, Roy
  * Gruzman, Neville
  * Gunn, Graeme

H

  * Häberli, Alfredo
  * Haimi
  * Halford House, Bayview
  * Hall, Peter
  * Hall Phillips & Wilson
  * Harkness, Ted
  * Harold Holt Swimming Pool
  * Harper, Sue career
  *  Reeves House
  * Harris, Phil
  * Hawke, Bob
  * Henningsen, Poul
  * HH House, Highgate Hill, Brisbane
  * Hildebrand, Denis and Janice
  * Hildebrand House, Somers
  * Hill, Timothy
  *  C House
  *  D House, New Farm, Brisbane
  * Historic Houses Trust
  * Hix, John
  * Holl, Steven

I

  * _In the Mind of the Architect_ (ABC series)
  * Inflation Nightclub
  * inner city revival
  * International Combustion
  * International Spirit of Nature Wood Architecture Award

J

  * Jack, Russell
  * Jackson, Daryl
  * Jackson, David
  * Jackson, Davina
  * Jacobsen, Arne
  * Japanese architecture
  * John Wardle Architects _see_ Wardle, John
  * Johnson, Philip
  * Johnson, Richard
  * Jones-Evans, Dale
  * Joy, Rick
  * Judd, Donald
  * JWA (John Wardle Architects) _see_ Wardle, John

K

  * Kahn, Louis
  * Kaiplinger House, Darwin
  * Katsalidis, Nonda
  * Kelly, Andras
  * Kempsey House
  *  additions
  *  Marie Short House
  * Kennedy House
  * Kenny, John
  * Kew House Sean Godsell
  * Wardle House. _see_  Wardle House, Kew
  * Kiely, Annemarie
  * Kitamura House
  * Koenig, Pierre
  * Kukkapuro, Yrjö
  * Kuma, Kengo
  * Kyritsis House, Eaglemont

L

  * Lang, Jack (French Minister for Culture)
  * Langer, Karl
  * Lasdun, Sir Denys
  * Last Wave, The (movie)
  * Laurie Short House
  * Le Corbusier
  * La Tourette
  * Ronchamp
  * Villa Savoye, Poissy
  * Learmonth, Jan
  * Lend Lease Carlingford exhibition
  * Leplastrier, Richard
  *  influences
  *  Palm House, Bilgola Beach
  *  recognition
  * Sydney Opera House
  * Levine, Harry
  * Little, Douglas
  * _Local Heroes_ (Hyatt)
  * Lord Somers Camp
  * Lucas, Bill
  * Lucas, Ruth
  * Lyons Architects

M

  * McCrae and Way (film studio)
  * McIntyre, Peter
  * McKeown House
  * _Mad Max_ (movie)
  * Mainwaring, John
  * Maison de Verre
  * Makigawa, Akio
  * Malevich, Kazimir
  * Marie Short House _see_ Kempsey House
  * Marsh, Randal _see also_ Wood Marsh
  * Marshall, Barrie: Phillip Island House
  * Marshall, Raine
  * Masuda, Tomoya
  * Matthews Snr, John
  * Maybeck, Bernard
  * Meadmore, Clement
  * Meier, Richard
  * Melbourne City Council
  * Melbourne Grammar
  * Melbourne Terrace Apartments
  * Mellor, Graham
  * Merchant Builders
  * The Metro
  * Meunier, John
  * Michell, George
  * Miyake, Issey
  * Mocatta House, Queensland
  * modernism/postmodernism
  * Mooloomba House, North Stradbroke Island
  * Moore, Engelen
  * Moroso
  * Mosely, Don
  * Mosman House
  * Muller, Peter
  * Murcutt, Arthur
  * Murcutt, Douglas and Ruth
  * Murcutt, Gary
  * Murcutt, Glenn
  *  Kempsey House
  *  Troppo Architects
  * Murphy, John and Phyllis
  * Myers, Peter

N

  * National Gallery of Victoria
  * National Trust
  * Needham, Rob
  * new rural architecture
  * Nield, Lawrence
  * Noble House, Noosa Heads
  * Noguchi
  * Nouvel, Jean
  *  Le Saint-James, Bordeaux
  * NSW Public Works Department

O

  *  Mooloomba House, North Stradbroke Island
  *  obituary
  * Olympic Archery Park, Sydney
  * Olympic Swimming Pool, Melbourne
  * O'Mahony, T.E.
  * 1 Collins Street, Melbourne
  * 101 Collins Street, Melbourne
  * '105' Noosa Valley
  * Osborne House, South Yarra
  * Ousback, Anders

P

  * P&O Building, London
  * Paddington House
  * Palm Beach House
  * Palm House, Bilgola Beach
  * Pape, Phoebe
  * Papua New Guinea
  * Park Bench House
  * Parker, Eric
  * Parker, Malcolm
  * Parkes, Cobden
  * _Pattern Language, A_ (Alexander)
  * PDCM
  * Peck, John
  * Peck, Robert
  * Peel House, Rye
  * Penn, Shelley
  * Peter Stutchbury Architecture _see_ Stutchbury, Peter
  * Pettit, Brian
  * Pettit & Sevitt
  * Phillip Island House
  * Piano, Renzo
  * Pie, Bruce
  * Pie, Geoffrey
  *  Pie House, Peregian Beach
  *  Pie House, Surfers Paradise
  * Pie, Sharon
  * Plecnik, Joze
  * Plumbers and Gasfitters Union Building, Melbourne
  * Poole, Gabriel
  *  Dobie House, Buderim Mountain
  *  Gartner House, Mount Tamborine
  *  Graceville House
  *  quadropod system
  *  Sherwood House
  * Poole, Simon
  * Poole, Zelma
  * Port Phillip (Estate) Winery
  * Powell & Moya
  * Powys, Daphne
  * Preshil School
  * Price O'Reilly House, Redfern
  * Prip-Buss, Mogens
  * Pritzker Prize

Q

  * Quarry, Neville
  * Quay Architects
  * Queenslanders

R

  * Ramsay, Lady Betty
  * Rawnsley, Angela
  * Rees, Lloyd
  * Reeves House, Clareville
  *  commission
  * Rembert, Harry
  * Rice House
  * Rickard, Bruce
  * Rijavec, Ivan
  * RMIT Building
  * Robinson, Ian
  * Robinson Chen: Hildebrand House, Somers
  * Rojas, Pilar
  * Ross, Barry
  * Royal Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal
  *  Gray & Mulroney Award
  *  Merit Award for Outstanding Architecture (New)
  *  National Award for Interior Architecture
  *  National Register of Significant Twentieth Century Architecture
  *  National Trust representatives
  *  NT Chapter
  *  President's Award for Young Architects
  *  Robin Boyd Award
  *  Royal National Theatre, London
  * Rylance, Mervyn

S

  * S Gandolfo house
  * Saarinen, Eero
  * Sachs, Peter
  * Sachs and Co
  * Sea Residence, Lilli Pilli
  * Searle, Philip
  * Seidler, Harry
  * Sevitt, Ron _see also_ Pettit & Sevitt
  * Shaw, Graeme
  * Shaw, Morrice
  * Sherwood House
  * Shoreham House
  * Short, Marie
  * Silo Apartments, Richmond
  * South Yarra House
  * St Andrews Beach House, Mornington Peninsula
  * St Kilda Football Club
  * St Margaret's Hospital, Chapel and Sisters Home
  * Stirling, James
  * Stradbroke Island North
  * Stronach, Peter
  * Stutchbury, Ernest
  * Stutchbury, Gwenda
  * Stutchbury, Peter
  *  house naming practice
  *  Peter Stutchbury Architecture
  *  Reeves House, Clareville
  * Subterrain (nightclub)
  * Sulman Award
  * Sunshine Coast
  * _Sydney Architecture_ (Jahn)
  * Sydney City Council
  * Sydney Opera House
  * Sydney School of Architecture
  *  Sydney's Peninsula _see also_ Palm House, Bilgola Beach

T

  * T House
  * Taglietti, Enrico
  * Taylor House
  * Taylor, Jennifer
  * Taylor, Peter
  * Tent House, Eumundi
  * Terroir
  * Thompson, Kerstin
  * Thoreau, Henry David
  * Timber Promotion Council
  * Tonkin, Peter
  * Trethewy, Denis
  * Tribe, Horace
  * Troppo Architects
  * TWA Terminal, New York's JFK Airport

U

  * UniTAB, Brisbane
  * University of Newcastle
  * University of South Australia, Hawke Building
  * University of Sydney Chemistry School
  *  Fisher Library
  * Urquiola, Patricia
  * Utzon, Jørn
  * Uytenbogaardt, Roelof

V

  * van der Rohe, Mies
  *  Barcelona Pavilion
  * Van Schaik, Leon
  * Venice Biennale
  * vernacular architecture
  * Victoria Street Apartments, Potts Point
  * Viney, Michael
  * Viney House, Hobart
  * Vineyard House

W

  * Walker, Bruce
  * _Wallpaper_ *
  * Wardle, John collector
  *  John Wardle Architects
  *  joinery design
  *  Wardle House, Kew
  *  elm trees
  * Warren, Neilsen
  * Webber, Peter
  * Welke, Adrian
  * Western Port Bay sea pilot station
  * Whitlam, Gough
  * Wilkinson Award
  * Winson, Don
  * Winter Park, Doncaster
  * Wood, Roger
  * Wood Marsh
  *  Gottlieb House, Caulfield
  * Woolley, Ellen
  * Woolley, Ken
  *  Palm Beach House
  * World Architecture Awards
  * Wright, Frank Lloyd
  *  Fallingwater
  * Wunda Road, Mosman
  * Wythenshawe Hospital, London

Y

  * Yuncken Freeman
  * Yve

Z

  * Zumthor, Peter

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to all the architects featured in this book for giving so generously of their time and so openly sharing their philosophies. While there may be some overlap in core beliefs, each delivers an individual approach that makes their work highly distinctive and very much their own. However this book is far from definitive. There are many other Australian architects, and many other houses, which deserve the title 'iconic'. If it were a history book it would have different emphasis but within the construct of this book I have chosen work that resonates with me personally.

I would also like to thank the home owners – Angela Rawnsley, John and Prue Hendry, Joe and Pesa Gottlieb, Denis and Janice Hildebrand, Deborah and Philip Jackson, Daniel and Lyndell Droga, and the owner of the Palm House, for opening their homes for photography and submitting to interviews and revealing another perspective.

As with the first book, the people who worked with me to produce this volume are the immensely talented photographer, Michael Wee, who has captured the houses with so much beauty and integrity; Andrea Healy, whose superb and sensitive art direction leads you through each inspiring chapter, and editor, Leta Keens, whose deep understanding of the subject matter is matched by her peerless way with words.

Throughout the prolonged journey of creating this book there is one person without whom I would have struggled to succeed. My husband, David Harrison, has been advisor, stylist, proofreader and generally reliable sounding board; he has moved furniture on the hottest of days, driven winding roads through rainforests, and read every page – twice.

From Murdoch Books I would like to thank the wonderful Diana Hill and all those who helped produce and market the book.

Finally, my gratitude goes to the late Bruce Rickard. Living in a house he designed in the late Sixties sparked my interest and was the genesis for this book and the last. He was an inspiring architect and a wonderful man.

Published in 2011 by Murdoch Books Pty Limited

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Publisher: Diana Hill
Designer: Andrea Healy
Photographer: Michael Wee
Editor: Leta Keens
Production: Joan Beal

Text copyright © Karen McCartney 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Design copyright © Murdoch Books Pty Limited 2011
Photography copyright © Michael Wee 2011

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The author(s) and publisher will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgements in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Author: McCartney, Karen.
Title: 70/80/90 Iconic Australian Houses: three decades of domestic
architecture / Karen McCartney.
ISBN: 9781743439111 (ebook).
Notes: Includes index.
Subjects: Architecture, Domestic – Australia – History.
Architect-designed houses – Australia – History.
Interior decoration – Australia – History.
Dewey Number: 728.0994

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook