OUT OF TURN
The sweeping arches of an eye-catching facade define the free-flowing inner structure of a Melbourne home for a seamless connection between form and function.
The sweeping arches of an eye-catching facade define the free-flowing inner structure of a Melbourne home for a seamless connection between form and function
The phrase that invariably issues to architects from clients with a bare site and the brief to build a new residence is ‘dream house’. The idiom comes steeped in idealisations of scale, surface show, room count, readycooked landscape and a decorative drama that shouts to the world, ‘We’ve made it.’ But as designers consistently lament, aspirations nearly always fall short of budgets and the bigger purpose of housing dreams — building a place of reverie in which the imagination can run free and the soul can cradle.
Sound soppy and untenable in these acquisitive times? Well, here’s a Melbourne home that posits the ‘dream house’ can be all things when driven by passion and a purist’s intent to dial down the design shouting. Locating in a south-eastern suburb of Melbourne, where mixed housing allows more free-range form than city-edge suburbs, it stands as a mansion of the mind — an allegorical architecture of winding stairways, shadowy thresholds and secret nooks that ferment mystery and memory.
Speaking from home-lockdown during the “welcomed pause” of the pandemic, architect Susi Leeton shares her thinking on the structure’s concept and street countenance — one devoid of the usual signifiers of domesticity — and informs that her site-wide arcing of a paperbarkwhite concrete wall was prescribed by existing trees.
“There were silver birches guiding a romantic pathway to the previous house,” she says of the fine-trunk verticals now set in sculptural relief against a grounded concrete rampart with mouse-hole cut-out. “The wall presents as a soft blank canvas to the street — a surface simulating the bark of the birches and featuring a shadow play of their feathery traceries throughout the day.”
Screening and sitting proud of a twostorey, north-facing structure that Leeton planned as misaligned L-shapes to make the most of sun and shade, the wall affords no transparency, no tell of the life behind, but still issues the welcome.
“As a frequent entertainer of extended family, the client wanted a friendly facade that protected privacy,” says Leeton, who mitigated any potential fortress vibe by concaving the wall into an architectural hug. “It was more about creating a sculpture in the garden than screening a house, but it poetically served that purpose.”
Citing a love of Constantin Brancusi’s sculpted smoothness and material honesty, the architect talks about removing all disturbance and irrelevancy from structure until a vibration emits merging medium and form. The notion sounds fanciful until entry entreats and movement is palpably managed through the threshold into a massive void, where all planes blur into an immersive, pulsing pearlescence (the outcome of polishing plaster).
The effect is one of standing inside the shell of a giant mollusc; a creature that has built from the tissue of its own matter around the axis of a logarithmic spiral, evidenced in the complex coil of a distant stairway. Space everywhere folds in, ebbing through passageways dismissive of orthogonal order, as if carved out by the resident species.
“Really, it’s kudos to the builder,” says Leeton as she credits Visioneer with a collaborative commitment to making complex naturalism fit. “Together we took pride in creating the experiential. It really was a labour of love.”
While the easy-read of circulation and space is denied by the resultant architectural ‘organism’, its flow and pulse works to put visitors into a meditative state and lower their blood pressure. ››
“Nothing is gratuitous. Mystery, openness, serenity and generosity are what I strived for” SUSI LEETON
‹‹ Beyond the decompressing chamber of first contact with this abstract conch, the short arm of the ground-level L-shape is given over to serene formal living, while the long arm leads towards the light in north-facing living spaces that peel back, at perimeter edge, to create a large open-air pavilion.
Here, a family living room — “washed in the light and pale colours of Positano” — connects to a kitchen dining area that affords an aberrant splash of cornflower blue in a large Lacanche cooker — sign-posting the dominion of a serious foodie. This social hub, enjoying garden vistas on three sides, defers all drama to an outer ellipse of pool, which frames, from inside, through a sequence of steel archways soon to drape in summer vine.
“They add a touch of northern classicism,” says Leeton of the soft geometries that subliminally call up happy European holidays. “They’re also quite feminising.”
But the poetics of space and detail aside, as a pragmatist and mother, Leeton diligently detailed common sense into a robust concept that catered for a family of four. Storage is concealed but copious, materials evocative but able to endure two teenagers, and surface everywhere works to make systems invisible — as realised in a sea-green wall that waves around a chimney-rise in a first-floor bathroom.
“Nothing is gratuitous,” says Leeton as she asserts that both the plan and her parabolic sculpting conspired to maximise space. “Mystery, openness, serenity and generosity are what I strived for.”
One cancels the other out, it could be said of her aspiration, but Leeton regards contradiction as the modern condition and seeks to make sense of it in structure, as the stairway so magically attests.
“Architecture is inhabited sculpture,” she says in repeat of her art hero, Brancusi. “Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.” And the state of mind that made such self-disciplined edit of the detail is distinctly female and maternal which is not to imply a cliched propensity for ather the such that It’s about ton of the hitecture. "Showing strength without shouting."