Made with Mastery

Chris Seidler, the core of the company’s construction arm, is now joined by the next generation: architect Luke Seidler and interior designer Sarah Seidler. This multidisciplinary team delivers a rare end-to-end service. “Seidler offers a holistic approach to actualising a family home,” says Luke. “Being a single point of contact allows us to build really strong relationships with our clients, guiding them along the journey and making sure everything they want to achieve is captured.” Seidler’s capabilities are stunningly expressed in a recent project in Melbourne’s Middle Park. Completed for family members, the residence allowed the team full creative freedom, making Middle Park both a culmination of Seidler’s cumulative wealth of experience in residential design and an insight into the company’s future.

Luke took the opportunity to consider new areas of innovation, particularly in sustainable technologies. The company had ample experience with geothermal heating and cooling in rural areas, “but we really wanted to explore how the technology could be used in an urban context for a home,” he says. The technology utilises the constant temperature of the subsoil to assist in the home’s climate control – via heat pumps, water-sourced fan coils and hydronic floor heating – as well as hot water and pool heating. “It’s quite a complicated system, but it uses very minimal energy compared to traditional methods. It’s exciting technology but rarely used in an urban setting.” Adapting commercial systems and materials is one of the ways in which Seidler pushes design boundaries. Another is the selection of a stainless-steel pool, rare for a residential project. Chosen initially for its aqua colour – appreciated through a perspex picture window – and hygiene benefits, the material also offers the advantage of being lightweight. “It’s located above the ramp for the basement entrance,” says Luke. “With the benefit of being a third of the weight of a concrete pool, it allowed us to have a column-free basement, which is handy for moving cars.”

Meticulous crafting of exquisite materials is another hallmark of Seidler’s work. For Middle Park, the design began with a material palette that was, in a sense, an ode to Melbourne, grounded by generous use of bluestone. Most often seen in the city’s historic buildings and cobblestone laneways, the vernacular material – custom crafted in collaboration with the Steel family of Bamstone – is used on both the interior and exterior walls and, in more raw form, in rough-cut slabs that form a curved privacy screen on the first floor, softened by foliage growing from integrated planters. The team further experimented with the raw stone in the wine cellar, with rugged slabs lining the wall behind a lacework of custom wine racks. “It looks as if the wine cellar has been carved out of the ground, and it acts as a backdrop to this beautiful room,” says Sarah, who also designed an inventive bluestone feature for the powder room – a basin carved from a monolithic stack of bluestone boulders. Lavish use of natural stone is balanced by delicate features, including slimline windows and steel-framed internal doors. “We don’t like to push a certain design style onto our clients, but with this project, being family, we had free rein to do what we do best – the pared-back use of beautiful materials and the quality of construction,” she says. “That’s what really represents us.”