(W)right House
First House
The folded geometries of this home are an ambitious take on subtropical architecture.
Built for his extended family, the first house designed by Queensland-based architect Charles Wright expresses a delight in folded abstracted lines and offers an oasis of pools and ponds for cooling and meditative reflection.
My first house, a holiday home for my extended family designed in mid-2014, marked the beginning of Charles Wright Architects. Having worked for nearly four years at Lyons in Melbourne, I wanted to fully immerse myself in a sea change and to delight in the possibilities provided by the hedonistic pleasures, social peculiarities, geographies and natural affluence of tropical Far North Queensland, where the landscape is verdant and luscious and where the Daintree Rainforest and mountains meet the Coral Sea.
This move became a permanent one, which has allowed Charles Wright Architects over time to focus on the principles and practice of tropical architecture. We consider our work as part of a genre categorized by latitude rather than nationality.
Interestingly, our Four Mile Beach House, which won Far North Queensland House of the Year at the 2019 Queensland Regional Architecture Awards, was in concept a critical review and expanded re-think of our first house, the (W)right House. These houses were completed eleven years apart but share similar siting (within separate gated beachfront estates in Port Douglas), design characteristics and materiality.
They fit into a body of work that experiments with big roofs and elevated platforms, where shaded openair living areas become community spaces for unrestrained social interaction, blurring the threshold between landscape and architecture. Both projects contribute as contemporary punctuation and counterpoint to the neighbouring eclectic mix of resort-style development with more traditional and stylistic modes. They suggest an alternative to traditional
tropical archetypes, such as the lightweight Queenslander. In contrast to the lightweight tradition, we strive for new solutions to the problems of living with climate change and more severe cyclones, flooding and bushfires. Our houses are resolved to withstand and shield in this harsh and corrosive environment: we typically use concrete and steel, not timber and tin.
Both houses are sited in gated communities overlaid with building covenants. We revel in the paradoxical potential of constraints and regulations and delight in the resultant geometric expression as a departure from convention.
In our first house, helicoidal minimal surface geometries made the most of prescribed roof pitches, while a plan informed by Fibonacci spirals and golden rectangles met the maximum allowable plot ratio and mandatory boundary offsets.
Compression in plan reflected our family’s need for a variety of living areas, shifting from enclosed private spaces to open and flexible communal spaces. Compression in section, meanwhile, helped realize the Venturi effect – in which a constricted opening accelerates air movement throughout the interior. Air is pulled through the house via thermal chimneys with mechanically operated vents, which form feature clerestory voids. The roof cavity is double insulated and separately vented, also using the Venturi effect to further eliminate heat gain. Ceilings vault upward in the open-living areas, directing views outward through articulated screening devices to the tropical landscape, while in the more private areas the ceilings compress down to provide for a more cosy, tactile interior. All spaces have large sliding glass panels which stack away and open out onto decks with bespoke steel-and-timber screens that shade semi-private outdoor meditative spaces, defined by dappled light and water features and pools that provide evaporative cooling and ambient, rippled reflections.
We often look back on the core ideas in our first house and find they are still relevant to our design approach today, in that we take delight in folded abstracted lines that crack open to let in light, or that multiply and spread out to form screens covering semi-enclosed decks, water features and pools – to enable new and flexible ways of living at a tropical latitude.