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In many ways this has a quite unassuming tone.
The house is quite restrained in terms of what we see with
the scale and ostentatious nature of what many others
are doing. I would say the house is quite modest. And it
does draw cues from the modernist period of Ivanhoe.
There’s some really beautiful houses from the 1950s and
we wanted references from those houses in more of a
contemporary way. This is where you get the courtyard
and how all the primary active living areas feed off that.
Charles Eames talked about the need to ‘take pleasures
seriously’ with all design.
The house is on that tightrope of being fun and serious at
the same time. It has a bit of complexity in its planning.
There was quite a significant fall on the land. It is a
single-storey home and we contoured the house to the
topography. I suppose one of the interesting things
we tried to do is look at the tension between public
and private space because they can never really be
completely separate.
How does this house differ from or advance those
traditions laid down by the 20th century modernist icons
and progress those early principles?
Interestingly enough this house does resonate from those
mid-century modernist traditions. You’ll find that the
more successful houses from that era are still relevant
today and maybe even more relevant given the type of
houses and the technology we have. Something we
were interested in is to design a house not to conform
with trends or fashions. One of the things that happens
with that sort of response is that they go out of fashion
very quickly. And unlike fashion, where you can take your
jacket off and put on a new one, houses don't have the
ability to do that. So we were interested in trying to find
a modest, yet interesting home that would last not only
for this generation, but generations to come.