A tale of two cities
Jeremy Bull of Alexander & Co has filtered the refined cosmopolitan edge of London through a heritage-listed warehouse lens, crafting a modern and tactile family home on Sydney Harbour.
In these so-called transformative twenties, as the world begins to redress in the wake of unprecedented upheaval, the question of who we are as a country and how we want to manifest that character seems never more fraught and potentially fabulous. What is Australian style?
With clear-eyed hope for the future, architect Jeremy Bull, the forty-something founder of boutique design firm Alexander & Co ponders the question of a national design vernacular; whether it still exists or indeed still matters relative to his latest project, a heritage warehouse-turned-familyhome on the fringes of Sydney Harbour.
“I could go on a spiel about critical regionalism,” he says in reference to the theorising of critic Kenneth Frampton who, responding to the homogenising effects of globalism in the 1980s, made a case for structure to be informed by a site’s climate, topography and tectonics. “If I accept that colonial settlers fundamentally dismantled anything that was critically regional when they first arrived — decimating all the Indigenous thinking around shelter — and that we borrowed colonial workmanship and applied it to whatever was available with regard to weather… I arrive at a whole lot of different morphologies; regional mash-ups of something European expressed in local materials.”
But now, there are none of the limitations on global supply chains that once gave structure its materiality, shape and dialect, he argues in reference to a culture that today splays off in every conceptual and aesthetic direction. “It’s the same all around the world,” he says. “Australian style is now pretty much arbitrary because it’s all up for grabs.”
Believing that design is now more focused on people than place — “one logically impacting on the other” — he says that the concept of luxury across all consumer quotients is re-calibrating to time — “not style, not look, not theme, not scheme dripping with expensive stone, but time” — the can’t-cheat-it measure of the making and thinking that goes into complex problem-solving relating to living, ecologies, sustainability and histories.
“And time was both the luxury and the limitation of this property,” Bull says, thumbsketching an entrepreneurial couple who, having spent the last 10 years in London, hoped to sustain the essence of that cosmopolitan life in a heritage-listed structure for a family of six.
“How to transplant their life in the UK into an important colonial building in less than 12 months, while convening all meetings and decision-making long distance?” Bull asks with more than a hint of the residual stress that came from preserving important industrial archaeology while materialising the wants of clients he had met only once. “The old warehouse-turned-admin-facility was perched on piers on the water and constructed ››