ARTISTIC LICENCE
A creative FAMILY turn to a renowned interior architect to REIMAGINE their inner-Sydney home.
A creative family turns to a renowned interior architect to reimagine their inner-Sydney home
When artist couple Susan Hipgrave and Edward Waring mentioned to interior architect Brian Keirnan that they might like to renovate their house, he responded, “Well, I’ve been thinking…” and opened the sketchpad he had with him, as always, whenever he came to dinner at their home in Sydney’s Redfern. “He immediately started drawing, saying, ‘We’ll make a hole through the dining room to the top floor and put in a big skylight, we’ll get rid of the fireplace and we’ll knock down that big wall over there, which I never liked anyway,’” remembers Waring. Keirnan, who died last year, aged 67, was renowned for his instinctive response to space and admired for the clarity with which he’d deliver his verdicts. His interiors exude nuance, exist beyond trend, feel somehow as if they should always have been there. The architect’s droll sideswipe about never liking that big wall anyway was pointed — it was Keirnan himself who’d designed it, along with the rest of the house, some 25 years earlier. Hipgrave was working in advertising back then, Waring in TV production. They’d recently married, with Australia in the grip of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and desperately wanted a house of their own. They’d found a tumble-down cottage in still-down-at-heel Redfern. “It was a house of sticks,” Waring quips. “I was terrified — it was beyond anything I knew how to do.” Hipgrave called in Keirnan, whom she’d met and bonded with while working on an advertising shoot. (“It was absolute, platonic love,” says Waring.) Keirnan’s verdict: “It’s amazing, you’ve got to get it!” He wasn’t talking about the house, which he knew at a glance had to be demolished. He was enthusing about the 48-metre-deep block on which it sits. ››
‹‹ The trio reconvened at the recently opened Bills cafe in Darlinghurst, which Keirnan designed. In that immaculate, sunlit interior for which Bills quickly became acclaimed, Keirnan pulled out a pen and began sketching (this time on a napkin) more than a house but a compound, a fortress. A secluded place in the middle of what was once among Sydney’s grittiest inner-city precincts. The floor plate of that initial plan — a tall volume at the front, a paved courtyard and then a secondary volume at the rear — was perfect. But 25 years on, the owners, who both gave up their jobs some time back to concentrate on their art practice, wanted to get more light in, to aerate both spaces and make it perfect for the next phase of their lives. They’d been thinking that a lick of paint and some newfangled LEDs might do the trick. Keirnan had a bigger vision. Orchestrated in tandem with architect Mark Pearse, who had worked with Keirnan since he was a student and now runs his own practice, the new light well spans the width of the building, allowing the open-plan dining and living areas to read vertically as well as horizontally. Removing the fireplace that had occupied the centre of the glass wall to the garden effectively extends sightlines right through to the back of the block. And that big wall Keirnan never liked? It’s become a monumental storage unit — a stack of elegantly discombobulated volumes crafted from rich yellow oak and honeycomb marble. Cantilevered from the wall and illuminated from below, the cupboards hover above the timber floor. At one end, a rogue oblong drawer protrudes to form a display shelf; at the other, a steel-and-glass cabinet floats out into space. “It’s got something of an Escher feel to it,” says Hipgrave as we ascend the narrow stairway concealed behind it.
The main bedroom occupies the first floor and gives onto a private terrace. It’s here Hipgrave works at a small round table, painting exotic flora and fauna onto porcelain plates using sable brushes from Japan. Supremely delicate, her fluid linear work references 19th-century scientific drawing. More Joseph Banks than Banksy, it’s fine work that revels in the decorative. Daughter Nina, 22, also an artist, has her bedroom (and impressive sneaker collection) on the next floor up. Waring’s studio is out the back, past a stand of mature bamboo. The original singlestorey bungalow has been endowed with a second floor, making it dialogue more eloquently with the main house. It’s up here that Waring creates sculptural assemblages of cut crystal and glass vessels. From his eyrie, a rustic timber door opens out onto the roof, where he picks perfectly ripe avocados from a towering tree. Looking back towards the main house, the rigorous composition is evident in the bank of full-height louvres that form the garden wall. The dropped ceiling over the dining area delineates it from the living space and the semi-enclosed kitchen reads like a theatre set. The robust structural program is offset by moments of whimsy — a bespoke barrel-and-pin metal balustrade that leads the way to the upper floors, undulating gossamer curtains, jewel-hued furniture in plush velvets that absorb and then emanate light. “The first version of the house was like a warehouse,” says Hipgrave, “but this is more like a home.”
Hipgrave and Waring have decided to call their home the Brian Keirnan House in honour of one Sydney’s most remarkable interior architects.