Box Clever - private home in Sydney, Australia

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 1999

An almost industrial approach created the large volume of this studio-house elegantly and economically.

A deceptively simple building is set in a suburban Sydney street lined with terraced houses, flats and warehouses. It occupies the site of two terraced houses, and the local council planners demanded that the street side of the building should reflect the previous scale, rather than that of a warehouse, so that the two-storey street (east) elevation is divided in half, with the garage and front door of the house dominating the ground floor of each. Above is the sleeping balcony, fronted on the street side by louvres which can be totally opened to light and breeze, or closed to give complete opacity.

Economy was one of the main criteria; so was the need to make a big space for use as a photographic studio, which could double as a living area. The big volume, indeed the whole house, has been created in an almost industrial way with steel portal frames 6m high and 7m wide, blockwork side walls and compressed fibre boards on front and back parapets. The whole shell is painted white.

The most dramatic element of the house is the back (west) wall, made up of six 6m-high glass panels which can be slid and stacked so that the whole can be opened to the little white court and the sky. In summer, natural through ventilation can be achieved by opening the west wall and the louvres on the street side; the glass wall is shaded by a neighbour's huge eucalypt.

Because the big space has to be rapidly converted from living room to studio, lightweight wheeled furniture was evolved (a new range by the architects). Because of the size of the volume, and the 5m-long kitchen bench, the horizontal scale of the elements is larger than normal, even if they are light.

A triumph of light and simplicity, the house/studio impressed the whole jury, though it failed to receive the first prize because some of us were a bit worried about what would happen if the neighbour cut down the tree in his back garden.

ARCHITECT

ENGELEN MOORE