JOURNEY MAN
Matt Gibson’s creative process aims to build a story in which the client is hero in their own narrative.
WHEN YOU ARE CONTACTED via Instagram to design a house in Norway’s Arctic Circle you understand the power of social media. “We jump at the challenge of designing something different from what we’re used to or designing in a different country,” says Melbourne-based architect Matt Gibson. From rural beginnings he moved to London after university in the late 90s where a role with prestigious interiors firm David Collins Studio pitched him into high-end fashion retail and hospitality design. “It was bespoke, highly refined work for Bond Street brands such as Armani and restaurants for Marco Pierre White. I learnt a lot about the craft, rigour and discipline of interior design, as opposed to concentrating on just a building’s shell.”
When he set up his eponymous practice in 2003, he aimed to meld architecture and interior design. Now a medium-sized practice, Matt Gibson Architecture + Design covers both disciplines with clear areas of expertise. Their work is mainly residential but they have undertaken retail and hospitality projects as well as St Mary’s Narthex church addition in Malvern – a pared-back, heritage-sensitive solution for additional space.
But it is the journey within the creative process of their residential work, which Gibson says is analogous to a “murder mystery”, that is at the core of the practice. He describes listening and observing, gathering all the evidence and following different routes of enquiry that might lead to an obvious answer. “We start out investigating and cataloguing: a unique site, the context, the existing fabric and the client’s background and culture.”
The client is entwined in the design’s evolution and it becomes their narrative – not one imposed by the architect. This ensures each project is unique and the end aesthetic emerges as an outcome of the clients’ investment. “It’s about a collaborative strategy and story rather than a predetermined result.” Even when clients, such as those commissioning the Concrete House, have a strong point of reference (Richard Neutra’s 1946 Kaufmann House), Gibson has ways of drawing out and interpreting the brief to create something relevant and unique.
“We aim to get to the essence of a feeling or meaning of a space,” he says. This holistic approach utilises the existing amenity and stories of the site to provide interconnections. “Interior, exterior and landscape are integrated conceptually and it’s never about just an object on a site.”
Gibson has a fascination with heritage buildings and delights in the ability to create and script new chapters in their lineage. Hiro-en House in Kew is a double-fronted Victorian villa with a modern addition to the rear. The new work Gibson describes as deliberately “language-less”, meaning it doesn’t compete with or compromise the original. To this end connections between old and new are light of touch and it is this sleight of hand that gives the work a respectful resonance. In a flourish of throw-back logic the addition has a woven stainlesssteel curtain that wraps the exterior, providing a dramatic interplay between inside and out while ensuring a highly functional solar and weather protection device.
His next project steps outside the city to country New South Wales, where design is in progress for a homestead. The client, a Dutch agriculturalist, who shopped the globe for the most idyllic land parcel, identified a property in Holbrook and commissioned Gibson. It is something the architect relishes and a project that may well draw on his rural beginnings as much as his architectural expression. mattgibson.com.au
“We aim to get to the essence of a feeling or meaning of a space.”