Down The Garden Path

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2000

Rex Addison has evolved a way of building appropriate for subtropical countries which draws on nineteenth-century prototypes as well as modern spatial perceptions and technology.

The site is part of a subtropical garden which belongs to the Addison family house, occupied first by the architect's grandparents and then by his parents. Planted in the 1920s, the garden is lush with overgrown palms and ferns and falls by degrees from a barbecue shelter to a gully. Beneath the palms and buried among the vegetation are retaining walls, terraces and paths built over the years by Addison's grandfather and father. On the far side of the gully, across the footbridge, the architect's studio emerges from the trees. Prefiguring the house, this pavilion on a raised deck is a confection of gables and bays with intersecting corrugated metal canopies oversailing the wooden structure. With its metal projections and angles, wooden recesses and thin walls it has a serendipitous quality.

That same quality is elaborated in the design of Addison's new house. In placing it in the garden so that it faces the studio to the north across the gully, he has been careful to weave through the trees, treading with care above and around the man-made incidents. An old path runs through the site from barbecue to studio and the house sails over it at head height with the undercroft supported on red columns adding to the garden structures.

Raised above the sloping site on columns and deck, the house is of lightweight construction, designed to a 1200mm grid, with exposed rafters and beams and a plywood skin around double-hung windows and sliding doors. The interior is further illuminated by slatted or fretted skylights while lower down, translucent canopies over bathroom and entrance act as light diffusors.

The house extends into the forest on two interlocking levels dropping down from south to north, the layers and corrugations of roof mingling with light-fringed palm fronds. The interior is filled with luminance made rich by reflection off wooden surfaces.

From a compressed entrance on the south, you step into the living area which flows under exposed beams and rafters into a (kitchen/dining room. To the east is a semi-covered deck. At the back of the building and raised up a half-level, a complex interlocking series of volumes -- for the main bedroom and bathroom, study, passage and guest room -- are stepped on plan diagonally across the building. In particular, the master bedroom under a curving ply ceiling, and the adjoining bathroom, both barely enclosed by glass walls, have all the enchantment of a private tree house. Each room in the house has built-in seating, storage and recesses for artworks.

The architect Peter Skinner has observed [*] that over the years Addison has 'mastered the language of gables, hips and valleys to stitch his works into local environments'. A complex elaboration of three intersecting gables, the Taringa roof is made up of the long ridge shooting north over the living area and the twinned intersecting gables over the two bedrooms that merge above the entrance -- 'a dignified figure observed in [the architecture of] Queensland state schools'.

(*.) Jungle Rhythms', Peter Skinner, Architecture Australia, July/August 1999

Architect

Rex Addison, Brisbane

Engineer

Mani Salmon

Builders

Lon Murphy, Ian Campbell

Photographer

Patrick Bingham-Hall