In Consultation with Nature – 8 Yard House by Studio Bright
8 Yard House – so named for its eight functionally distinguished outdoor spaces – upholds the premise that enduring and responsive homes are unified by an alliance with and an intrinsic connection to the natural world. Designed by Studio Bright, the home has been realised through a series of gestures towards streetscape, orientation, interior navigation for a large family, and an overarching thoughtfulness for current and future needs both inside and out.
“I don’t believe you can achieve good architecture without thinking about landscape,” says Studio Bright Director Mel Bright. “Our cities shouldn’t increase in density if that puts our green spaces at risk, so we need to be more considered about how we insert those spaces into our architecture.” This is a guiding principle that informs 8 Yard House at a fundamental level, creating a home that exists beyond the bounds of the built structure to encompass the entire site.
8 Yard House sits in a context dominated by traditional terrace houses. Respectfully breaking from the abiding heritage narrative of Melbourne’s inner-north, its façade is a beautifully disparate aesthetic of rhythmic, offset brickwork accentuated by the joyful patterns of light and shade coaxed from each exposed facet. “Our clients didn’t want a house that was loud,” says Mel, “rather, one that sat gently in the context.”
The simple plane of the home’s front elevation is softly curved towards its entry, as though beckoning inhabitants to explore beyond the perforations of the lime-washed bricks. While the design language is distinguished from the surrounding built environment, a neutral palette, circular roof detail – which mimics the silhouettes of surrounding rooflines – and an intentional accord with the widths and proportions of nearby terraces, support the home’s integration into its streetscape. Mel acknowledges that “our job as architects is to recognise that our ‘client’ extends to the city, the neighbourhood, the community, and so we need to think about that.” From the very first impression, 8 Yard House wholly encompasses this intent within its larger built landscape, unobtrusively elevating the local environment without eschewing fluent design cues.
Inside, a full agenda of living spaces has been provided to meet the needs of all inhabitants, calling for a significant built volume. Crossing the entry threshold, traditional terrace patterns nostalgically inform rooms that straddle each side of a central passage, supporting the referencing objectives of the façade by seeking a resurrection of heritage notes through contemporary applications.
A quietude settles upon a front master bedroom where light is filtered through the façade’s apertures and across an intervening courtyard space. A design sense balances strong materiality and sparing styling. This is a space devoted to sleep, where heavy drapes and expanses of walls are a uniform hue reminiscent of the midnight sky. Woollen carpets, large sliding doors and a remove from the social spaces of the home render silence and underline purpose.
As the home unfolds, principle living spaces are displaced along the site envelop to the southern boundary, each becoming progressively more private in nature. This overly linear arrangement has been counterbalanced through a series of astute design interventions. “We try to make spaces work really hard and be really efficient and use architecture as a vehicle for landscape,” says Mel in reference to the home’s mediation between interior and exterior.
Continuing the essence established by the courtyard at the front, a second outdoor space reveals a sequence of exterior zones. Featuring a pool, this second space activates the home’s interior through an ambient play of water-reflected light. Continuing further, courtyards link both each other and the interior via thick, materially homogenous divisions that march uninterrupted through the external skin to define both rooms and gardens.
Upstairs, 8 Yard House caters to the current and future needs of the younger inhabitants of the home while still retaining an intrinsic link to the outdoors. Children’s bedrooms, arranged in dormitory format, fall off to the south-orientation. To the north, a passageway performs as more than mere access. Punctuated by the same bisecting divisions as downstairs, innovation has informed a succession of built-in seating and linked study nooks.
These light-filled spaces draw the children from their bedrooms, maintaining social connection and gently defining the true purpose of the different spaces with their opposing qualities of productivity and slumber. Working in harmony with both these functions, however, is a considered treatment of the upper exterior elevations of the home. Aluminium screens address privacy and environmental tempering, while allowing natural light to wash over the shared areas through a botanical veil by virtue of planter boxes. This detail retains the atmosphere imbued downstairs, binding the house to its garden outlook.
The methodology of 8 Yard House, its calibration of rooms, and the deep familiarity and comfort in their repetition and holistic connection with the outdoors, is interrupted at the home’s culmination on its lower level. A lounge room is stepped down, distinguishing its navigation and anchoring the home to its sense of place by bringing the subsequent seating repose into alignment with the surface of garden space at the rear.
8 Yard House yields to the parameters of its site. Despite the generous scale of the home, the design has been driven by “an overall desire to get landscaping to eventually take over all the brick walls and walled gardens. Where landscape will one day hang down and creep over.” This intent renders the surrounding built environment with a sense of having emerged in response to the home rather than the other way around.
