Situated within the internal Brisbane suburb of Spring Hill, Inexperienced Home is the third venture designed by Brian Steendyk to occupy the identical part of slim road – 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 follow over greater than twenty years, together with a real concern for preserving the suburb’s specific character as one in every of Brisbane’s oldest residential areas. However Inexperienced Home additionally presents a departure: constructing on the teachings of earlier initiatives, Brian approached the brand new home with extra willingness – and confidence – to discover bolder, extra expressive structure.
In consequence, this modestly scaled residence on a two-hundred-square-metre web site teems with concepts. Every half is crammed with 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 – wherein every bit is rethought from first ideas. Concrete blocks are glued collectively, eliminating the necessity for mortar, and stainless-steel sunshades double as planter packing containers to create a inexperienced curtain of foliage that filters daylight. Unsurprisingly, the outcome doesn’t seem like anything in modern Queensland residential structure. It eschews the notion of favor and sits other than current Brisbane designs. What’s most spectacular about the home, nonetheless, is the best way wherein Brian has introduced its complicated mixture of concepts, areas and supplies collectively into an entire 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 cloth that hardly ever 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 many years by a recent vernacular in concrete and masonry. However what’s fascinating about Inexperienced Home is the best way wherein metal is employed to reinvent conventional types, and to reinstate the thinness and lightness that was as soon as so attribute of structure in Queensland. In sensible phrases, metal permits 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 ground, that are unencumbered by construction. Likewise, the corten metal stair seems to hover weightlessly, connecting the bottom ranges whereas maximizing usable area with its slim 10-millimetre-thick partitions. A custom-designed spiral stair in even thinner sheet metal gives entry to the loft and consumes minimal ground space. As Brian quips, “metal makes magic occur.”
Metal additionally permits precision, and the parts of Inexperienced Home are designed with millimetre accuracy to take advantage of each a part of the constructing and web site. This rigour and exactness is typical of Brian’s work, which may typically appear as if 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 outdated elements of the constructing into a posh entire. However the rigour that underpins the design isn’t celebrated for its personal sake. On the contrary, it’s a means to take away or cut back the visible weight and litter of construction, as an alternative shifting emphasis onto the qualities of the area 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 might be heat and simple to reside in, not regardless of the meticulousness of the design, however due to it.
These concepts culminate within the creation of an out of doors room, framed by a hovering metal portal, that protects the dwelling areas from rain and summer season solar whereas letting winter gentle deep into the plan. If the notion of an “out of doors room” has develop into one thing of a cliché in Queensland actual property, right here it’s given a novel expression with folded corten plates prolonged across the backyard to include each sky and panorama. Constituted of three-millimetre-thick metal sheet, the roof and partitions are fully self-supporting, utilizing folds to remove the necessity for extra 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 results 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 strategy that has formed each a part of this exemplary venture, demonstrating an intensification of spatial concepts and materials explorations developed over years. Greater than this, Steendijk’s Inexperienced Home can be an indication of the inherent potential of the standard Queensland home itself, and its capability to be reimagined and remade.
