A Place of Reference – Kyneton House by Edition Office
In a landscape that is in perpetual flux, shifting in concert with the seasons, Kyneton House was conceived as a constant, a place of reference that bears witness to the passage of time. While the architecture is resilient – both the materiality and form harking back to the old weather-beaten buildings of the surrounding area – it is also highly attuned to the ephemeral qualities of the environment and the lives that are carried out within its walls.
An awareness of seasonality and of sensitivity to the landscape was inherent to the project from the outset, explains Edition Office co-founder Kim Bridgland. “Our clients, who described themselves as being in the autumn years of their lives, were relocating from an expansive property in the Macedon Ranges and requested a smaller home that drew upon both the qualities of their much-loved hillside estate and garden,” he says. “Conscious of reflecting this period of their lives, they also hoped the home might capture the qualities and atmosphere of autumnal light, colour and texture.”
This simple, poignant aspiration is felt in the reassuring nature of the building. Situated deep on the site, the home is enveloped in the garden, which contains several mature trees relocated from the clients’ previous property. Yet a sense of singularity, characteristic of Edition Office’s work, is inherent to the house that exists as an architectural element in its broader setting, emphasising that, though it is immersed, the building is not overwhelmed. Rather, it is a distinct presence that in its very steadfastness responds to the dynamic temporality of its context. “The clarity of its external architectural form situates it as a fixed constant to the garden and to the occupiers who will change and grow and age through the seasons and years,” says Kim.
Substantial walls of rendered brick define both the building envelope and the rooms within. The soft blurring of the render denies the regularity that tends to be associated with new masonry work, instead accentuating the material qualities of clay brick that often only become felt through the patination of age. Within the home, these mighty walls always return inwards to embrace recesses that provide a “nesting place” for a seat or a desk in each space and deepen the reveal of every external opening, framing views of the outside world. With lines of sight through the house to the garden enabling the full length and breadth of the site to be read from within, the accentuated physicality of the walls serves as a counterpoint: emphasising both the mass and the edge of the building, they become not only a containing but a grounding force.
The effect of this weighty presence also provides another important contrast, heightening the effect of the lofted ceiling. Where externally, the roof is of galvanised steel (a robust and traditional material, much like brick), the ceiling inside exhibits a far more refined, contemporary quality. With the clients having lived for many years in a place with significant external space and their new home being located on a fairly typical township site, Edition Office chose to instead celebrate vertical volume. Kim explains that the intention was to distill a very efficient floor plan “that was balanced with a clarity and specificity inspatial experience. Framed within the textural brick walls, each room or space within the house is defined by two elements, a vaulted and light-filled volume within the ceiling and a framed view to a particular aspect of the surrounding garden.” Where views outward inherently capture the cycles of the seasons, the skylight hidden within the apex of the ceiling provides a direct connection to the more fleeting nuances of light as it moves and changes over the course of a single day.
Juxtaposing durable materials such as brick, concrete, timber and galvanised steel with the precisely folded, clean white ceiling voids, which reflecting light become akin to lanterns, and the ever-changing views of the garden beyond, the architecture expresses the creative potential of the duality between the constant and the transient, the material and the intangible. As Kim explains, the house does not simply exist as a static place from which to observe the passage of time, the internal rooms themselves “become a canvas for the theatre of change occurring outside.” Yet while the house actively draws these transitions into its heart, the precision with which the core elements of light, space and material are distilled, controlled and manipulated ensures that the building can contain and even to an extent embody the effects of time’s passing while also remaining itself relatively immutable.
Juxtaposing durable materials such as brick, concrete, timber and galvanised steel with the precisely folded, clean white ceiling voids, which reflecting light become akin to lanterns, and the ever-changing views of the garden beyond.
