Calming Warmth – House Caramél by CJH Studio
Intended as a transportive portal, House Caramél combines an existing townhouse shell and carefully layers a textural richness to elevate the everyday experience. CJH Studio focuses on embedding warmth through subtle variations and a blanketed consistency throughout, emphasising the home as a place of calm.
Acting as a unique expression of its owners, House Caramél becomes emboldened with gestures of warmth and an encasing feeling of shelter, as a series of new layers add a welcomed depth to the home. Located in inner Melbourne, the multi-level townhouse sees a foundation of high-quality finishes form the base of the resulting spaces, where a more binding approach is used to bring the old and new together as if conceived at the same time. While the established home offered a solid base, folding in elements that better reflected the new owners enabled a sense of identity and of their own narrative to be shared throughout. Taking the inhabitants and visitors on a journey once inside, CJH Studio has created a home that feels like a destination of its own.
Acting as a unique expression of its owners, House Caramél becomes emboldened with gestures of warmth and an encasing feeling of shelter, as a series of new layers add a welcomed depth to the home.
Focusing on light while also creating a shared sense of intimacy internally, House Caramél is the result of a curated approach that has a high impact with contained intervention. While the original brief and scope was to propose soft introductions and textiles to the home, the extent grew over time to ensure a completeness of the vision could be realised. By homing in on warmth as a key factor and by eliminating vast differences in tonality across the palette, there is a softness created shared across the walls, floors and all the introduced joinery, furniture, lighting and artwork throughout.
Together with timber and the introduction of natural stone, texture is brought into the spaces through the surface materials and their interaction with incoming light. A replanning uses the more deeply set areas for places of retreat, while those closer to natural light are where the more open and connected communal zones are positioned. As a carry-forward of the original townhouse, a heightened and detailed approach to joinery throughout is used as both a support to everyday life and as crafted pieces in their own right. The soft brushed nature of the walls then completes the picture, with an embedded movement in the application of the finish.
