Taylor and Hinds Architects In Profile
A love of the Tasmanian context, and a desire to enrich occupants’ experiences, underlie this studio’s practice.
Comprising the keenly observant Poppy Taylor and Mat Hinds, this Tasmanian firm takes a cerebral approach to placemaking that nonetheless holds warmth, wonder and the human experience at its heart.
Since establishing their practice Taylor and Hinds Architects in 2013, Poppy Taylor and Mat Hinds have produced a range of projects that reflect an intense commitment to extending the traditions of making places to dwell in Tasmania. Poppy and Mat’s studio in the coastal township of Cremorne, about a 30-minute drive out of Hobart, hints at the core values of their practice. Here, within a 1950s cottage on the neighbouring property to their own residence, life and work are necessarily and joyfully entangled, creating a humble setting that resonates with their humanistic approach to work.
Inside the cottage, a number of dividing walls have been removed to create a large shared space for desks, with the interior linings of perimeter walls stripped away to reveal the hardwood studwork and diagonal bracing. The framed walls are rough, honest and beautiful in their tectonic simplicity, a characterful contrast with the plainness of the exterior encountered on entry. An old cast-iron fireplace sits centrally, ready to combat the cold, and is surrounded by a series of simple pieces of timber furniture that support the various activities of working – among them an old drawing desk that harks back to the traditions of the profession (and which is occasionally used by Mat when he needs to escape the shackles of the computer). A sun-drenched corner of the room, framed by two existing windows, is occupied by a pair of upholstered mid-century timber seats and provides a cosy nook for discussion and a spot to take in the colour and light filtering through the tree canopies in the front garden.
This pragmatic, playful and distinctive interior setting in which Taylor and Hinds works thriftily embodies two key architectural concerns that guide the practice’s work: an embracement of, and extension to, the traditions of making buildings for the contemporary Tasmanian setting, and the exploration of the inner character, or interiority, of dwelling within the Tasmanian climate and context.
In Taylor and Hinds’ work, the idea – and, perhaps more significantly, the act – of extending the traditions of building is most acutely evident in Bozen’s Cottage (see Houses 132) in the southern midlands town of Oatlands. At its core, this project is a loving restoration of a significantly dilapidated convict-era Georgian cottage for a couple seeking weekend retreat from the city. However, Taylor and Hinds’ design goes far beyond a paint-by-numbers approach to
heritage repair: it has carefully layered the building with a series of finely crafted insertions that “scaffold” contemporary life and form a spirited dialogue with the original built fabric of the house. These added parts are not simply expressed as new but are rather articulated as contemporary extensions of the particular and, in the architects’ words, “peculiar Van Diemenian Georgian” building tradition that the original house exemplifies.
Another example of this attention to and respect for prior eras of making buildings can be seen in the Longview Avenue House, an alteration and addition to a charming 1950s house designed by Edith Emery. Given a simple brief to update the interior of the original house and provide a new living space, Taylor and Hinds sought to carefully understand and then continue the material and spatial expression of the original house. As a result, the new work is both a literal and conceptual extension of the postwar modernist original. This is not to say that the new parts are not without their own identity and originality. An idiosyncratic moment in the new part of the Longview Avenue House is a large window that is cranked out of the eastern wall to frame a distant view of Hobart tumbling down to the banks of the River Derwent. Deep enough to sit in, the window is experienced as a type of habitable threshold at the periphery of the plan, a design move that is evident in many of Taylor and Hinds’ works.
Lower Jordan Hill Road is another careful act of extending an older building. An addition has been grafted onto the rear of a Federation villa, on top of a new sandstone
An idiosyncratic moment in the Longview Avenue House is a large window that is cranked out of the eastern wall to frame a distant view of Hobart tumbling down to the banks of the River Derwent.
plinth that is conceptually extruded from the foundations of the original building. The painted weatherboards of the old part of the house are scaled up to form the cladding of the new build, in some zones becoming operable shutters to regulate privacy and light to the rooms behind them. Each new room has a distinct inner character and degree of interiority, including a timber-lined, hipped-ceilinged living room, a vaulted library annexe and a series of white rectilinear wet areas harbouring a thin bent brass wall that forms a secluded room-within-a-room for showering. The word “room” is particular here, as distinct from space. Where the simplest interpretation of the latter might imply the practical provision of a volume for use, “room” – in the case of this and other Taylor and Hinds projects – implies a crafted interior setting that is scaled, sculpted, lined and furnished to envelop and enrich the activities, interactions and moments of living.
Taylor and Hinds’ approach to room-making and extending the material and formal traditions of building play out definitively in the Denison Rivulet cabins, a trio of short-stay accommodation units overlooking a rugged stretch of coast north of Bicheno. The cabins are like architectural distillations of the humble Tasmanian shack: a compact and tough exterior shielding a series of warm, intricate and materially rich rooms, each set in careful relationship to the
vast surrounding landscape. The urge to open up the interior as much as possible to the spectacular views has been resisted in favour of creating carefully proportioned apertures that draw in light, air and the spatiality of the landscape beyond. Some rooms avoid viewing out altogether and are instead simply an immersive interior experience of material and light. In these ways, the cabins form a strong sense of protection and shelter, containing rooms that are tuned to waking, retreating and sleeping at either end of a day spent outdoors, at any time of year. Details such as the bent pipes of the outdoor showers, and ledged and braced doors and hatches, further tie these highly wrought pieces of architecture back to the frugal and handcrafted traditions of coastal shacks.
Despite much of the discussion here being about the physical constitution of Taylor and Hinds’ architecture, it is important to be clear that encircling the formal and material manifestations of their design sensibilities is a fundamental endeavour to design houses that aim to enrich the occupants’ experiences of living. To paraphrase the practice directors, Taylor and Hinds is committed to “making architecture that is focused toward the essential nature of human experience, serving to occasion human being.” In this way, theirs is a deeply human-centred architecture, and one that is informed by – and ultimately “of” – the unique, peculiar and wondrous place that is Tasmania.