Playful ABANDON
From the outset, this Melbourne home presents as a quintessential Victorian-era dwelling for a growing family but left-field thinking from an architect couple has matched traditional polish with renewed energy.
The conditions that chiselled Victorian-era housing into an analogue of Greek antiquity differ wildly from the concerns that now shape contemporary residences into concrete boxes. Both architectural orders mirror the aspirations of an age and their attendant revolutions — one industrial, one digital — but in matters of style, they sit at rival poles. For any designer charged with retrofitting 21st-century wants into 19th-century workings — a constant in the heritage-overlaid streets of Melbourne — these polarities present major challenges. How to create correspondence between a pastiche of the Parthenon and an algorithmically shaped purity, while inserting a new signature and smooth spatial transitions?
For Kathryn Robson and Chris Rak, husband-and-wife principals of the namesake architecture and interiors practice briefed to extend and refresh this neo-classical gem in Melbourne’s Brighton, the answer, without a hint of condescension, went right above their heads.
“Up to the roofline,” qualifies Robson as she directs gaze, from her kerbside vantage in a crescent resplendent with heritage housing, to a pitched slate roof popping above a high boundary wall. “Chris and I got really excited by those lines and the potential to extrude them into a new addition.”
Such deference to existing contour might read as a backslide to those who think that new must express the now, but Robson and Rak believe we live in a continuum of culture and that architecture needs to reconcile the dimensions of both time and space without resorting to what Robson terms “cheap trickery”.
Their values are shared by the clients, Amber and Kristiaan Rehder who, as parents to “robust” boys Beau, Jack, Rocco and Luca, briefed Robson Rak to build on history with a durable hardiness. “But not in a slavish way,” says Robson of the group decision to raze an existing two-level 1980s addition (exemplar of the era’s tortured excesses), and replace it with a three-level family hub that visually defers to outer pool and garden designed by Jack Merlo. “It was more about reiterating presence, solidity, monumentality and memory.”
Robson Rak’s efforts to materialise that memory (both collective and individual) could be likened to psychoanalysis: they cultivated deep insights into client behaviours, cleared away the mental clutter and cut through to the unconscious mind that moors in childhood. The concept of play was deemed the experiential pathway to that subliminal place by both architect and client who requested a “forever, fairytale house” that hides secrets in its walls.
“So there are two boys’ bedrooms up on the top level,” says Robson, again raising eyes to the slated canopy that conceals the all-new addition from the street. “Up there we sited a secret trap door into a roof space fitted with a spiralling slide.”
Rak continues his wife’s breakdown of the built-in elements of play that activate every level, through an outward-facing open-plan living zone to a basement carpark big enough for a pro ball game. “You travel through the ceiling, sliding down to lower level, where a ceiling net catches your fall above the rumpus room floor,” he says. “It had to be structurally engineered for safety.”
This house-wide detailing of childish delight beggars belief, so the pair direct passage inside for the up-close inspection. But first they stop to discuss the formal entry hall in which all allusion to antiquity has been stripped back, abstracted and allowed to breathe.
“There was a doorway down there into the master suite,” says Robson of the sybarite’s heaven, hiding behind a new wall, at the end of an entry edged with Ionic, Corinthian and Tuscan columns.
Rak thinks this odd mix of orders is typical of an era that relied on available labour; one that often lost the design intent in translation. But the duo like the ‘kook’ it lends to the rigorous symmetry of a hallway premised on the old hierarchies of space and status.
Within this entry void they primed for a transfiguration of style and century, reinforcing the ruling neoclassicism with marble — in the mosaic-tile floor and fine-leg brass console by Daniel Barbera — and broaching modernity with the insert of steel-framed glass doors (sound-proofing for side-flanking formal rooms) and lighting hung to flying-saucer effect.
Robson Rak pulled colour, sparingly, from the stained-glass idylls of antiquity that surround the front door and specified its hummingbird blues, faded mints, persimmon orange and foliage greens for furnishings and fine art at the classically inflected end of the contemporary spectrum.
“We have tried to avoid the ‘trendy’ aspects of interior design,” says Rak of a scheme that gradually boils Victorian grandeur down to a monumental minimalism of dark veneers, textured marbles and modular blocks of knock-about sofa in new architecture. “We focused instead on high-standard specification and quality that will keep the house relevant for the next 100 years.”
It’s a prosaic way to put the importance of duration in a world that rips through resource, but Robson and Rak are more interested in making architecture that incubates and enshrines memory rather than describing it. “Don’t we all remember childhood through the houses we inhabited?” questions Robson, circling back to the idea of play. “We’re really in the business of building a sense of self.” VL robsonrak.com.au
“We have tried to avoid the ‘trendy’ aspects of interior design. We focused instead on high-standard SPECIFICATION and QUALITY that will keep the house relevant for the next 100 years” CHRIS RAK