Architects: Walter & Walter
Project: House A – Indoor-Outdoor Connection
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Area: 240 m2
Year 2016
Photographer: Ben Hosking

A house in a suburban landscape that is composed as a field of rooms that are in in direct dialogue with the site terrain and surrounding context. The house opens and closes, refocusing the relationship of the house with its suburban context influencing formal outcomes which alter between public and private realms.

The house sits in an open landscape and ensuring an optimum indoor-outdoor connection. A simple facade and massing focuses attention on the house’s relationship with its landscape and opens directly to the street disrupting commonly defined boundaries of public and private space in a suburban street. The site is open. Passers by can, if they chose to, navigate around the house and experience its settings.

The selective openings in the plan of the house allow moments of porosity for landscapes to inhabit. These different landscape conditions are each unique in response to the orientation of the space. Allowing landscape to coexist with suburban built form. Revitalised relationships have been created between suburban architecture and its natural environment.

Openings in physical barriers, at various scales, reset territorial boundaries creating diverse connections between neighbours and landscapes. The plan opens up and then closes in an ongoing dialogue with the terrain.

Materiality is a detail often oversimplified or over complicated. A rough sawn timber used for the exterior reveals a native material quality often erased from view. It is this rough and protective boundary that allows for natural variation of the material while also encouraging the visitor to touch with caution. Moving through the house the texture changes and volumes open up and collide with open landscaped spaces that punctuate the plan. Opacity makes way for transparency, privacy for openness and inclusion.