“My home feels like a secure and loving, masculine embrace.” (client)
Hidden in an affluent coastal suburb is 'Vodka Palace' a luxurious concrete cave, tempered with natural timber finishes and primed for premium culinary, audio and visual pleasure. It is the result of a very strong collaborative process between client, architect, builder, sub-consultants, sub-contractors and suppliers. The architect was the Producer, the builder was the Director, the client wrote the script, and the sub-consultants, sub-contractors and suppliers were the invaluable technicians and artisans that pulled the vision from the ether into a 3D reality. The spirit of this project was one of its greatest joys, all worked together harmoniously to manufacturer a resolution and it is this fact in which I take the most pride. Enduring relationships have been forged and I see the end result as not my own but the combined efforts and inspiration of everyone involved.
The site was purchased by an author seeking a tree change having lived in inner city Melbourne for many years. The dwelling is part of a larger project to re-imagine and revitalize the underworked paddock into a place of habitation, connection and reflection. The site slopes in north south direction and have been sculptured into subtly undulations from surface water that seeps through the ground from the adjacent Springhill. The dwelling is sited towards the high point of the site adjacent an outcrop of granite that forms an imperceptible rise to the north of the building site, offering both a foreground for aspect from the dwelling and obscuring view and noise from the road.
The leafy suburb of Indooroopilly, located in Brisbane’s west, enjoys a gently rolling terrain with and large swathes of remnant bushland. Its proximity to the burgeoning University of Queensland and connected by rail to the city saw the suburb become very popular in the immediate post war period with generous housing blocks affording an ideal garden suburb lifestyle, and it attracted many of the city’s younger professionals and academics at the time. Many of the houses were designed by architects and notwithstanding the post war constraints on house sizes, ceiling heights and materials, many of these houses illustrated an inventiveness and quality of design which distinguishes the character of the suburb. An existing architect designed, weatherboard and terracotta tiled roof house, relatively modest in size, but well considered in it’s siting, planning and quality of construction, had served previous generations of the young family who now inhabited the house. Set on a large half acre block, the house and garden that had evolved, apart from its size offered many of the best attributes for an ideal contemporary sub-tropical lifestyle. However modern living demanded more space, not only to better accommodate cars and storage, but also separate study, play, guest and entertainment spaces along with the need to generally upgrade the interiors and their connection to more generous outdoor living areas and provide new kitchen, bathroom and laundry areas.
Hayball has been working closely with Braemar College on a new campus Masterplan. Stage one involved the development of a new campus to provide a stand-alone Middle School for students in years 5-8.
The new campus celebrates education and social interaction, responds to the rural context while respecting distant views to surrounding natural landmarks. It addresses the challenges of the existing steeply sloped Macedon Campus: managing fire risk for its community, providing contemporary learning environments, and allowing equity of access to all spaces.
The clients’ brief was clear and simple: a semi-permanent residence – something more than a weekender – for a couple, their dog and sporadic visitors. The site, located in Somers and virtually on the beach, offers panoramic views across Western Port Bay. Somers is a small beachside town established in the 1920s, stretching from the Coolart Wetlands to the Cerberus Naval Base on the Mornington Peninsula. Although just one hour’s drive from Melbourne, the area is still a relatively low key holiday place, characterised by elevated modernist fibro houses, unfenced gardens and native bushland vegetation.
The apartment they had bought had the great location and a broad front to Sydney harbour as its core attributes. It is spread over three levels, with the main level, the one with the greatest qualities, having been divided into a kitchen area and a bedroom, and the living level having been located below ground. Two bedrooms on the upper level did not require much attention and were in principle left as they were.
The transformation at Regent has a lot to do with light. The house was laid out in a traditional Victorian format with characteristically dark front rooms. A skylight now spans the length of the kitchen, and the formal rooms open onto the airy new combined living space. A double height light reveal floods the dining room and boys’ room above with additional light.
The new Rail Operations Centre for Sydney Trains was designed by Jacobs in association with Smart Design Studio. The concept for the building was borne from a very specific brief, which called for a vast top-lit, solid-walled control room atop several floors of open commercial workspace. This presented an opportunity to create a unique building that positively contributed to the new urban fabric of the Green Square city centre, expressing its function as a piece of railway infrastructure.
Hidden behind a listed 19th century shophouse of inner city Melbourne, the contemporary extension skillfully navigates a very tight site to wrap two boutique apartment buildings over a retail space around a central courtyard. The gold finned facade screen creates angled privacy from the street and provides an animated play of light and shadow throughout the day.
His and Her House is a celebration of connection and coming together. The clients had each engaged FMD Architects for previous house designs and when the two embarked on this new project together to mark the start of their married life, His and Her House completed the reconfiguration of one of the projects and drew qualities from the other. The pitched ceiling soars to 4.5m, giving a grand sense of scale and volume and is accentuated with dramatic, triangulated skylights, forming a mobius like configuration of two shapes coming together, referencing the clients’ eternal love. The angled shapes create a pattern language that are referenced throughout the interiors from the glazing and joinery forms, down to the smallest detail such as the triangulated cabinetry pulls. The spaces are richly layered with warm honeyed timbers, with visible knots & cracks celebrating the natural inflection and beauty of the timbers.
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