ARCHITECTURE
Design is a “holistic exercise” to leading Sydney architect Madeleine Blanchfield, whose latest triumph is Tree House, her own imaginatively oriented home.
Madeleine Blanchfield embraces an holistic design ethos.
TO VISIT ARCHITECT Madeleine Blanchfield’s newly completed family home, Tree House, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs is to experience a severe case of house envy. Her longstanding interest in interiors (she worked alongside David Katon of Burley Katon Halliday for a decade) shows in the marriage of the structure, the furnishings and highly curated art. Godammit, her BOYY leather bag, in a shade of rich cognac, is the same tone as the Saarinen ‘Womb’ chair it sits on. “I’ve never been able to separate interiors and exteriors. You live on the inside and I have always approached the design as a holistic exercise, as a total object”, says Madeleine. Not only is this interest aesthetic, it is practical. “If we’re designing a kitchen we want to know where that window is,” she adds.
She is also a problem solver. The original 1920s California bungalow sat on a steep site dropping almost three storeys to the road and so she relocated the living space to the top level allowing for expansive ceiling heights, glass, light and garden views. There is a legibility of structure that is almost Japanese in its sensibility and a calm, measured quality that the timber panelling and neutral furnishings impart. “Of course, doing your own house you have to ask yourself, what do I stand for?” she says. “It was also a loaded project because I had to consider what did I want for my family and to meet the expectations of my husband, also an architect.”
So, when surrounded by all this perfection is it hard to imagine Madeleine in her early 20s, a graduate from ANU in Canberra, working in an architect’s office for 10 pounds an hour and living Harry Potter-style under the stairs of a London house. “I shared with four skanky guys and hot water was coin-operated so the mornings were always particularly dark and cold,” she recalls. “But on the upside, it was intellectual and intense, and I travelled throughout Europe, which was a new experience for me.”
She acknowledges her time at Burley Katon Halliday as formative. “David Katon was great mentor and taught me to be brave and stick to my guns to get what I wanted – especially on-site where I now have a reputation for being ferocious,” she laughs. “When I would get uptight and overly concerned with getting everything right, his great sense of humour would diffuse things reminding me that nothing we were doing was life or death.”
When starting a project, she is not one for ‘doodle-y sketches’ but rather turns to the science before the art. “I want to know where the light is, the sun and the views, how the site performs, so while I know I can make a beautiful building I never commit to a form too early on,” she says.
This philosophy has stood her in good stead. Gordons Bay House, which she designed as her first solo project while nursing her new baby (and pretending to be professional and in control at site meetings after sleepless nights), won the prestigious New Houses category in the NSW Australian Institute of Architects Awards in 2013. From then she has expanded the practice, acquired staff as projects require (few of which have ever left) and developed a reputation as one of Sydney’s most refined and thoughtful practitioners. This cerebral quality is matched by an ability to be playful. Her mirrored outhouse in Kangaroo Valley disappears, lost in its own leafy reflections, while the oregon-lined ceiling in
Crescent Head House creates a bold gesture referencing the pitched roofs of the surrounding area. “I am not a pitched roof sort of architect so by pulling it into the interior the connection to the context is there without a conventional response”.
Madeleine seems to have this enviable capacity for learning. She delights in a heritage apartment project in The Astor in Sydney’s CBD as she had to research a whole new architectural language, she has completed a diploma in feng shui because it was a topic that kept coming up with her clients, and she won an Australian House & Garden magazine and Mirvac initiative called My Ideal House looking at how the principles of orientation for light and responsiveness to a site might play out in a modular solution for project homes.
No knowledge is ever wasted and some of the lessons from the Mirvac experiment found their way into Bendalong House, designed for her Canberra-based parents. “Initially it was to be a holiday house for them, but once they occupied it they never left,” she says. It thankfully escaped the summer bush fires by a whisper and in a deeply humane Australian gesture her mother now regularly feeds the local kangaroos they once sprayed with water to stop them eating the plants. madeleineblanchfield.com