Shelf life
Rebuilt from the ground up, Australian architect John Wardle’s Melbourne home is designed to accommodate and display his vast curio collection
Architect John Wardle’s Melbourne home
At the age of 12, John Wardle went exploring the banks of the Barwon River in New South Wales, Australia. He stumbled across a building site. An old farmhouse was being torn down. But, in the centre of the demolition stood, like an oasis, an ancient home. ‘I remember seeing, right in the middle, this beautiful, original, timber-shingled, single-room cottage,’ Wardle says. The farmhouse had been built in stages over generations around the timber cottage, like a Russian doll. ‘They must have been adding and building around it again and again over the generations.’
As the bulldozers and diggers lay hulking and dormant, the young Wardle crept into the building site to stand in the middle of the timber room. He spotted, still in situ, the lock to the door of the original cottage, and took it home with him. The lock remains in his newly refurbished home today – and marks the beginning of the great Australian architect’s lifelong personal collection of curios.
Wardle founded the Melbourne-based practice John Wardle Architects (JWA) in 1986. He now employs more than 90 people, looking after a wide range of
commissions, from private residences to office, cultural and educational works. His office is also where he used to keep what he calls his Museum of Stolen Objects, a collection of artefacts that have piqued his curiosity – mostly inexpensive, but all precious, each collected on his travels or gifted to him by fellow makers and artists.
The Museum of Stolen Objects now has its own private gallery of sorts – Wardle’s newly completed home. ‘I’m an avid and very ill-disciplined collector of things,’ Wardle says. ‘But I’m interested in prototypes or experiments as much as finished objects.’ And with that comes a weakness for flea markets. Every Sunday morning, wherever in the world he finds himself, Wardle will be up at sunrise scouring the Formica tables for things some of us might think of as junk. His collection contains countless items found in markets from London to Ljubljana, São Paulo to Tokyo.
At his new home in Melbourne, Wardle has fashioned spaces where such varied pieces can have a dialogue with each other. ‘I enjoy the process of finding commonality among things,’ Wardle says. ‘In how things can become associated through arrangement – even if, very often, they are disparate things.’ This, he says, speaks to his identity as a proud Australian: ‘We are very much a society of hybrids.’
An impertinent type might suggest Wardle’s collecting habits are eccentric to the point of obsessive. A fan of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Wardle developed an obsession with the moment Malcolm Mcdowell’s Alex jumps from a window to escape the torture of listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Kubrick filmed the scene 19 times on a Bolex movie camera. So, for a period, Wardle scoured the earth to collect Bolex cameras (he found 12).
Ceramics also have a particular place in his heart. On a visit to the UK, he once took his two daughters and wife to Stoke-on-trent, once a pottery powerhouse, to show them a bottle kiln used for traditional pottery (the kiln’s unique shape later influenced JWA’S design for Monash University’s Learning and Teaching Building). ‘I’m fascinated by the processes and the societies and the people that make important objects,’ Wardle says. ‘The skill-sets that were developed in a particular place at a particular time. I love to know who made things; when, how, where and why it was made.’
Wardle is walking through the foothills of Melbourne as we talk. Arriving home remains a novel experience; the renovations took more than 18 months, only reaching completion just before Christmas 2019. The house was first built in 1951 amidst three enormous Scottish Elms, planted in the 1870s. The home ‘threads and moves and merges around the trees’, says Wardle, who bought it with his wife in 1990. In 1999, Wardle ‘sliced the front third of the house off ’
‘I’m an avid and ill-disciplined collector. I enjoy finding commonality among things’
during a major renovation. Eighteen months ago, ‘we pulled the whole lot out and started again’, he says. ‘There’s now nothing left of the original house.’
Wardle has not merely extended his home. He has created a unique architectural blueprint that provides a specific space for each component of his collection; bespoke corners, built-in shelving and niches for each and every thing he holds dear. An angular timber wall feature has been created as a home for a favourite painting – it’s a picture frame that also forms part of the architecture of the home. Wardle worked closely with Melbourne craftsman Chris Overend, who runs ‘a rare set-up’, Wardle says – a construction company, where joinery and fabrication is maintained in-house – and was employed to create the home’s cabinetry. ‘We worked to create areas of inventive precision and extraordinary quality,’ says Wardle. In the openplan kitchen, Wardle has designed a dining table, fabricated by Andrew Lowe of Lowe Furniture, of two interlocking circles – a tribute to his daughters, who recently left home to study and work abroad.
The domestic designs and displays have been a long time in the planning. Wardle spends his summers at Waterview, a working sheep farm on Bruny Island, Tasmania, where he has turned an old shearing shed and an aged farmstead into Shearers Quarters and Captain Kelly’s Cottage. These two projects can be seen as drafts; practice runs before he took on the task of transforming the main family home in Melbourne.
The house, in that sense, is a tribute to the life of a man now recognised as one of his country’s leading architects. Wardle has got there via a lifetime built absorbing, piece by piece, everything of interest he finds. Now he has melded them into one original, unique and beautiful space. * johnwardlearchitects.com