ONE CRAZY CUCKOO
DIANA ROSS, ASTRO BOY AND BUNNINGS WAREHOUSE ARE JUST A FEW OF THE INSPIRATIONS BEHIND ARCHITECT MATTHEW BIRD’S AWARDWINNING THEODORE TREEHOUSE.
Diana Ross, Astro Boy and Bunnings Warehouse are just a few of the inspirations behind designer Matthew Bird’s award-winning Theodore Treehouse
There’s something about Melbourne architect Matthew Bird and his Theodore Treehouse apartment that draws comparison to TV’s Dexter Morgan, the fictional forensics expert who spends his days solving crimes and his nights committing them. Not because Bird is a nascent serial killer seeking redemption through his work — though one look at his shovel-topped bed, dressed with disembodied hands, and the sociopath starts shaping — but because he is a likeable character who mediates the conflict between outer concerns and outrageous inner impulses. Indeed, how many thirtysomething architects do you know with academic tenure at a top university and a taste for the aesthetics of Astro Boy, the sci-fi Japanese cartoon that popularised anime in the 1960s? Unlike many of his professional peers who worship at the Brutalist altar of Le Corbusier, Bird looks to different demigods — even disco goddesses. “Like Diana Ross on the dancefloor at Studio 54,” he says of his muse for the revamp of a rental flat he found on the third floor of a modernist Toorak block designed by émigré architect Dr Ernest Fooks in 1962. “I was thinking of her when I reimagined these rooms — Motown-rich, telescoping all sightlines out to that magnificent peppercorn tree,” he explains, ››
‹‹ nodding to the luxuriant veiling of an old evergreen gleaned through a shimmering curtain of spanner-anchored industrial chains, across a balcony stacked with yellow gas cylinders — propped for their playful allusion to large Lego heads. He chose to chocolate-dip his living-room walls Mission Brown, a much-maligned 1970s colour. “The Haymes Paint guys helped match my scenographer’s mindset to some moody shades,” he says. There’s Iris White in a master bedroom that looks like an ante-room to the afterlife; Black Pitch in a hallway that tunnels to it; Geranium in a kitchen colour-matched to the Sherrin (the official ball of the Australian Football League); and Revitalise in a study briefed for ‘Bunning’s green’ (but more of that corporate-crush later). Bird’s colour-coding of space is both conceptual and common sense, with furnishings and fixtures conspiring to make a room suggestive of another place and time. One look to the living room’s deconstructed disco ball, bobbing above a suite of vintage velvet sofas by Dario Zoureff, and the senses suck straight back to disco-era Gotham City. “It’s actually an ‘ Astro Boy’ light, not a disco ball,” corrects Bird, informing that the bulbous pendant with the ‘Astro’ referential fins was created from two laser-cut mirrored domes, manufactured to conceal surveillance cameras. The domes no longer serve to surreptitiously observe, though the architect likes the implication of their covert function. Rather, this Bird’s-eye beauty raises the level of light and reflects the room’s many tributes to design influencers of the 20th century. There’s big love for American architect Bruce Goff, the mid-century organic Modernist, who is framed front and centre of Bird’s ‘diningtemple’ — a space shaded with gauzy drapes of gutter-guard and furnished with a structural pyramid produced from 12 steel car-park bollards. “I think of it as a shrine,” he says. “It forces a strange formality of behaviour when dinner guests sit under it.” No kidding! This Bird is one crazy cuckoo who continues the accolades to American design eccentricity across a living-room wall fitted with a full length of perforated steel (a proprietary shop-fitting). This bit of bling has been colour-printed with Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map and propped with hardware that makes cryptic commentary on world politics — a hose-gun riveted to Russia hints at Vladimir Putin’s approach to diplomacy. “It’s a bit of fun,” says the architect, understating years of serious research into symbolic structures made from scavenged materials. “Just a rethink on interior design; a kind of journey.” That journey recently took a hallucinogenic side-trip into Venice, where Bird’s Sarcophagus — a proposition for time-travelling teleportation taken in a funereal receptacle — featured in the Palazzo Mora as part of the city’s 15th Architecture Biennale. Some might think his futurist concept for luxury travel ‘ fowl’, if not deranged. “Yes, Freud would have a field day,” he allows, “but I find beauty coiling in the macabre and the commonplace.” That insight circles Bird back to Bunnings Warehouse, the handyman’s emporium that is his decorative wellspring. “Mentone is my favourite outlet, but if they don’t have what I need, I do the triangle of bayside stores and beyond. I know every aisle of every store, intimately.” It’s not your normal designer boast, but then Bird is not your normal designer. “Tell me what is normal?” he questions as he wonders whether he has benchmarked it with a category-win for the Theodore Treehouse at the 2016 Australian Interior Design Excellence Awards. “Has the paradox of scavenged luxury finally been popularised?”