Image Credit : Dianna Snapes Photography
Project Overview
The Balwyn North house by ON Architects masterfully plays with spatial perception.
The striking façade, featuring a U-shaped white brick frame around high windows adjacent to a sleek single-storey black garage, cleverly conceals the interior's spaciousness.
This design invites visitors on a journey of discovery as they traverse the external corridor leading to the house's entry, situated towards the middle of the site. Upon entering through a grand pivot door measuring 3 meters high by 1.5 meters wide, visitors experience a sense of entering a private sanctuary.
Wandering through tall, elegant spaces with an organic, minimalist feel, gaze at the foliage patterns created by the sun on the pristine white brick walls, and discover two courtyards that offer a connection to nature through views of trees both on the property and the neighbouring land.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Architect - Andy Chung
Contractor - Kasi Mua
Project Brief
The project brief was to design a single-storey house tailored to the lifestyle of a couple approaching retirement, with distinct functional areas such as individual study spaces and a high level of privacy, allowing for a retreat from the outside world into a welcoming and calming interior.
The design needed to incorporate views of two beautiful pin oak trees, one on the property and one on the neighbouring land, and maximise natural light.
Accordingly, the design was informed by themes of sanctuary and retreat, connection to nature, and the living environment's rhythms, patterns, textures, and shapes.
The white brick façade next to the sleek black box garage cleverly conceals the true nature of the space within, creating a striking presence that reveals little of the delights inside. Visitors are invited to enter the house at its heart, emphasizing the sense of retreating from the busy streets into a space of peace, quiet, and calm.
Project Innovation/Need
The innovative use of white bricks in the façade creates a distinctive U shape, with the lower part of the U carefully laid out to appear as if floating from the base.
This white brick structure forms the corridor leading to the main entry and creates an external seating area. The inclusion of courtyards in the design reimagines the traditional front and back suburban gardens, challenging the notion of separate house and garden areas by integrating green spaces into the house itself.
The placement of the living room between the north-facing middle courtyard and the back courtyard allows for maximum sunlight and cross-ventilation.
The corridor leading to the master bedroom at the rear of the property is adorned with a tall maple tree outside the window, providing garden opportunities and allowing the morning sun to project soft, natural light onto the white walls, creating evolving foliage patterns over time.
Design Challenge
Maintaining the integrity of the design's organic, airy feel, and ensuring ample natural light and ventilation, while accommodating the functional requirement for numerous rooms in a single-storey dwelling, posed a central challenge.
The use of white bricks, despite their inherent heaviness, needed to convey a sense of lightness and delicacy in the façade.
Achieving this required meticulous craftsmanship, with the double brick wall laid and returned, and the top part placed on structural PCF approximately 3.2 meters above the internal finished floor level. This design element continues over the top of the front façade, extending towards the rear of the roofline, creating an appearance of lightness.
Sustainability
The house design thoughtfully incorporates two courtyards positioned strategically to enhance ventilation and natural light, thereby minimising the need for heating, cooling, and artificial lighting. The placement of the living and dining areas between these courtyards ensures optimal natural lighting and excellent cross-ventilation, creating a harmonious and energy-efficient living environment.
Architecture - Residential - Constructed
This award celebrates the design process and product of planning, designing and constructing form, space and ambience that reflect functional, technical, social, and aesthetic considerations. Consideration given for material selection, technology, light and shadow.
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