Architectural Team: Simon Pendal, Builder: Peter Bodeker Construction, Structural: Atelier JV, Estimator: Ron Jessett
Photographer: Roberth Frith
2017 AIA The Peter Overman Award For Residential Architecture - Houses (Alterations and Additions)
2018 Winner of National Dulux Colour Awards - Multi Residential Interior2018
National Houses Awards - Commendation - Apartment or Unit
The existing townhouse located at the end of a 1990s reproduction Georgian Mews was tired and unremarkable. The upper floor was a warren of rooms and dark corridors while the ground floor had no spatial presence. Its courtyard had diminished in importance and was filled with building services. We were asked to re-phrase the townhouse as a cohesive whole.
Our approach was to consider the townhouse as a sequence of set pieces where daily life is intensified. This evolved on two principal fronts;
i) to accept and occasionally embellish the decorative parts of the original (reproduction) interior – ornate skirtings, ceiling roses, cornices and plasterwork – and treat each of the spaces as ‘castings’, and;
ii) to intensify these ‘cast’ spaces through the use of a single colour per room on floors, walls and ceilings.
Immersion within the coloured rooms - white for bedrooms, emerald green for the kitchen, black within niche spaces and the dressing room and Prussian blue for the upper sitting room - suspends people and things in singular thick space, correlating a specific atmosphere to intended use. Transitions between rooms are amplified by vivid colour change orchestrating a powerful sequence from one to the next. The Prussian blue room in particular arose from our interest in making spaces which possess the effect of Chiaroscuro paintings.
To achieve these set-like qualities, we sought an accord between colour, its alignment and the use of artificial and natural light. Pendant light fittings were correlated to room-tone and colour. These either recede so as to amplify the effect of pooled light (a white fitting within the white kitchen niche, a black fitting within the Prussian blue room), or become objectified so as to contribute to the composition of things (the white pendant held by a white circle within the scaled corner of the Prussian blue room). Elsewhere, white alcoves and portals become illuminated vessels – at first floor level the white stair portal and white alcove act as lived scenery enlivened by the human figure (both are adjuncts to the intensely dark Prussian Blue Room).
Natural top light intensifies luminous niche spaces by day (the white kitchen niche and the white first floor alcove) or acts as an axial termination in darkness (the black dressing room).
Diaphanous linen curtains temper Perth's harsh light, and in certain rooms such as the all-white bedrooms, to allow each to have a presence that that is almost fog-like.
