An Enduring Warmth – Arthur Street by Architecton

Words by Bronwyn Marshall
Architecture by Architecton
Photography by Dave Kulesza
Interior Design by Architecton

Balancing the bold and the geometric, Arthur Street draws on a masculine base to propose a warm and enveloping family home, elevated through texture. Architecton carefully layers contrasting elements to create a natural hierarchy and elevate the everyday, ensuring a timeless resolve.

Endowed with an enriching warmth, Arthur Street combines a dark and moody palette with rich tones and a sense of restraint. Within its typified and residential context in greater Melbourne, the home sits comfortably in Aberfeldie and draws on surrounding scale and form to ensure the insertion feels considered. The home’s form is broken down over its multiple levels to allow for an articulation of the façade; this deconstruction of the overall scale and mass of the home adds a geometric quality in the process. A similar ordered language is then brought into the resulting spaces and intersecting joinery elements, forming a strong linear language. Architecton combines the functional with the beautiful in crafting the connected and open modern home.

Areas of openness in Arthur Street are balanced by more intimate pauses, creating moments of compression and release as one moves through the home, mirroring the function of each space.

An emphasis on calm underpins each of the principles and decisions of the home, including the palette and materiality applied throughout. As a practice, the team at Architecton endeavour to combine feeling removed from the outside world with feeling connected internally at the same time; how these principles play out in each case is nuanced in their own way, directed by each individual home. At the core is an understanding of how the home’s occupants live and how they want to engage with one another. Areas of openness in Arthur Street are balanced by more intimate pauses, creating moments of compression and release as one moves through the home, mirroring the function of each space.

While a sense of simplicity runs throughout Arthur Street, each detail has been finely tuned to ensure it will endure over time. As a long-term vision for the residence and its owners, ensuring its timelessness informed the palette and materiality. A series of grey tones were selected to be used throughout, with varying densities and richness at play as its base. The muting of these elements allowed the natural veining and texture to be celebrated and for the focus to remain on creating a calm and relaxing feel throughout.

A series of grey tones were selected to be used throughout, with varying densities and richness at play as its base.

Steering its own path, Arthur Street elects for a more enduring approach. Architecton focuses on creating a removed and private family home, marked by custom features created specifically for how they want to live.