Situated within the interior Brisbane suburb of Spring Hill, Inexperienced Home is the third challenge designed by Brian Steendyk to occupy the identical part of slim avenue – and the second of them that Brian designed for himself. Comprising renovations of conventional Queensland homes, this assortment of neighbouring designs reveals the consistency of concepts in Brian’s observe over greater than twenty years, together with a real concern for preserving the suburb’s explicit character as one among Brisbane’s oldest residential areas. However Inexperienced Home additionally presents a departure: constructing on the teachings of earlier tasks, Brian approached the brand new home with extra willingness – and confidence – to discover bolder, extra expressive structure.
Consequently, this modestly scaled dwelling on a two-hundred-square-metre website teems with concepts. Every half is full of novel design options that search simplicity and sustainability, whereas every room has its personal set of particulars and custom-designed fittings. It’s a full-scale experiment – a veritable testing floor for structure – through which each piece is rethought from first rules. Concrete blocks are glued collectively, eliminating the necessity for mortar, and chrome steel sunshades double as planter containers to create a inexperienced curtain of foliage that filters daylight. Unsurprisingly, the end result doesn’t appear like the rest in modern Queensland residential structure. It eschews the notion of fashion and sits other than current Brisbane designs. What’s most spectacular about the home, nonetheless, is the best way through which Brian has introduced its advanced mixture of concepts, areas and supplies collectively into a complete that’s greater than the sum of its elements.
To no small extent, this unity is achieved by way of the intensive use of metal – a fabric that not often options so prominently in modern Queensland homes. Certainly, the presence of metal is notable not solely due to the area’s lengthy and romantic affiliation with timber building, but in addition as a result of this conventional language has been supplanted in current a long time by a up to date vernacular in concrete and masonry. However what’s attention-grabbing about Inexperienced Home is the best way through which metal is employed to reinvent conventional varieties, and to reinstate the thinness and lightness that was as soon as so attribute of structure in Queensland. In sensible phrases, metal allows a spread of structural and spatial options: the 2 bedrooms and attic areas within the current Eighteen Nineties timber cottage float above the open dwelling areas and bed room/library on the bottom flooring, that are unencumbered by construction. Likewise, the corten metal stair seems to hover weightlessly, connecting the bottom ranges whereas maximizing usable house with its slim 10-millimetre-thick partitions. A custom-designed spiral stair in even thinner sheet metal supplies entry to the loft and consumes minimal flooring space. As Brian quips, “metal makes magic occur.”
Metal additionally permits precision, and the parts of Inexperienced Home are designed with millimetre accuracy to profit from each a part of the constructing and website. This rigour and exactness is typical of Brian’s work, which might typically seem like large items of commercial design. After all, such precision calls for care and planning – it’s no shock that this home took three years to finish. It additionally establishes a strict and rational framework that brings the assorted new and previous elements of the constructing into a fancy complete. However the rigour that underpins the design will not be celebrated for its personal sake. On the contrary, it’s a means to take away or scale back the visible weight and litter of construction, as a substitute shifting emphasis onto the qualities of the house and the richness of the fabric palette. Importantly, re-used hardwoods, timber joinery and brass counter tops are allowed to keep up their pure variations and patinas. They soften the severity of the metal and glass and contribute to the consolation and character of the interiors – areas which can be heat and simple to stay in, not regardless of the meticulousness of the design, however due to it.
These concepts culminate within the creation of an outside room, framed by a hovering metal portal, that protects the dwelling areas from rain and summer time solar whereas letting winter mild deep into the plan. If the notion of an “out of doors room” has turn into one thing of a cliché in Queensland actual property, right here it’s given a singular expression with folded corten plates prolonged across the backyard to comprise each sky and panorama. Comprised of three-millimetre-thick metal sheet, the roof and partitions are completely self-supporting, utilizing folds to remove the necessity for added construction. Their sculpted surfaces additionally play within the daylight, creating patterns of heat orange and darkish shadow that draw the attention by way of the home to the outside and lengthen the perceived boundaries of the inside to the complete extent of the location. None of that is by probability. The consequences of sunshine on metal, and the discount of construction to the barest minimal, are calculated experiments executed with care and precision. It’s the similar exacting method that has formed each a part of this exemplary challenge, demonstrating an intensification of spatial concepts and materials explorations developed over years. Greater than this, Steendijk’s Inexperienced Home can also be an illustration of the inherent potential of the normal Queensland home itself, and its capability to be reimagined and remade.