Ageing gracefully
Several architects in this issue have shirked a new, “fresh-out-ofthe-box” aesthetic in favour of something Amy Hallett of Topology Studio calls “inbuilt age.” Though the studio’s South Melbourne Beach House (pictured and page 114) is a new building, there are many aspects – including the location of the kitchen at the front of the house and the handles on the kitchen cabinets – that are informed by the previous incarnation of the house. “Locals recognize the old house in the new house,” she adds. In the kitchen of Zuzana and Nicholas’s Monash Road House (page 78), apertures offer views into adjacent rooms and recall the former locations of doorways in the postwar house. In Too Many Tims Are Never Enough (page 58), Multiplicity has recycled doors from the old house and woven them into the new interior, “giving the new a sense of the building’s history, to confuse or muddy the linear timeline of what happened when,” says Tim O’Sullivan.