ARCHITECTURE

The enduring partnership of Sydney’s Casey Brown is leading the way in site-specific architecture.

Casey Brown are masters of design for extreme terrain.

I FELL IN LOVE with a Casey Brown house once and seriously contemplated a move outside the scope of my financial capability, but it wasn’t until this interview that my instinctive, emotional response to the house made rational sense. “Our understanding of architecture is embedded in history,” says Rob Brown, co-founder of Casey Brown Architecture with Caroline Casey. “We like to reveal layers so that people have a subconscious familiarity with the materials, form or shape. On one hand we are resolutely about the present, but our work resonates with the past and that gives people a sense of recognition.”

Brown’s experience of the history of architecture – and the trades that contribute to it – is very much first-hand. In his early 20s he left Sydney, where he’d completed an architecture degree at UNSW, to take up a Lethaby Scholarship in the UK. “I was the first Australian to spend a year working with ancient building trades,” he says, recalling travels in a Morris Minor, cobbling stone in Scotland one day and thatching in Cornwall the next, dining with Lord Northampton and then staying with the local stonemason and his family in a worker’s cottage. “I got an incredible grounding in materials and understanding the structure of these buildings. I also saw the level of skill and witnessed how hard these trades were, which gave me a great deal of empathy,” he says. Next followed a master’s degree in advanced architectural design at Columbia University in New York, which balanced his previous experience and helped form the practice’s signature approach to design, topography and lifestyle. “We often deal with extreme terrain, extreme maritime, lots of big trees, rocks and storms,” Brown explains. “If you don’t get the design right, you won’t achieve the desirable lifestyle outcomes.”

One such project is the James Robertson House in Sydney’s Great Mackerel Beach, a water-access-only slice of land with a 60-degree slope. Caroline Casey recalls the intensity of the process: “Every decision was highly debated and considered with the clients. There was a great deal of intellectual rigour applied, and no decision made without a thousand discussions and three bottles of wine.” It was a commission where the architect’s vision was complete inside and out, with Casey designing interior elements such as the huge sculptural table that had to be helicoptered onto the site. It is her contribution as an award-winning furniture designer that sets the practice apart. Her input into the interior spaces – with crafted screens, bespoke shelving and furniture pieces – is integral to the experience of their houses. “We’ve been designing houses for 30 years and I still believe, to quote Mies van der Rohe, ‘God is in the detail’. The things we touch and engage with daily have huge significance,” says Brown.

There is also a romance to some of the projects, with Permanent Camping, a two-storey, copper-clad cabin on a remote piece of land in NSW’S Central West, garnering international attention. At the other end of the scale, Casey Brown are in demand for large family houses. With an aversion to Mcmansion-style piles, they strive to break up the mass by using pavilions stepped down a site and splitting roof lines to reduce their perceived bulk. “Many of our clients need a big house but don’t want to appear ostentatious,” he says.

Acknowledging they are ‘lucky’ to get these landscape opportunities, the recently completed Crackenback Stables in the Snowy Mountains (for high-end builder John Fielding of Bellevarde Constructions) was an extraordinary, robust response to the landscape. Briefed on a stable for five horses and two separate living quarters, the project embodies Brown’s love of high craft, skilled use of materials and cutting-edge technology. But at a more prosaic level, Casey Brown clearly does have luck on their side. When Fielding was choosing an architect for the job, he was concerned about offending all those firms he works closely with, so put 10 names on pieces of paper in a hat and pulled out ... ‘Casey Brown’. Visit caseybrown.com.au.

This pavilion is deceptive: it presents as if it were a single storey while cunningly accommodating five different levels within the volume (above). The client brief asked for the creation of a ‘sleepout’ distinct from the existing house and that reflected its coastal site at Victoria’s Portsea. The backdrop of the tennis court generates a relaxed vibe along with the integration into the landscape through its weathered grey cladding and the growing creeping vegetation. mitsuori.com