Light of Foot – Lambton House by Curious Practice

With an innate intimacy, Lambton House is a play on scale that develops a nuanced brief unique to its clients. Curious Practice creates key connections to context with an emphasis on landscape and a sense of immersion through a light-footed approach.

On its corner allotment in Lambton, the same-named house engages with a variety of typologies and is the result of a rigorous and experimental exercise in best use. Originally intended as a renovation and extension of an existing residence, the process unearthed a number of unexpected surprises along the way and became decidedly problematic to continue. In its place, a new build was conceived to work with the site in its own way, while offering a formal response that was both meaningful and created a sense of connection to its place within the streetscape. In its mere 55sqm footprint, the resulting home ensures the spaces reflect their owners and their intended use, without excess. Curious Practice places increased emphasis on the value of the surrounding landscape, ensuring a unique residential experience is created, and in turn, a light-footed approach to site emerges.

Its intentionally restrained outline instils an ingrained efficiency on site and a measured approach to each of the gestures that exist between the encompassing walls.

Constructed by Built by Eli, Lambton House is a family home with four bedrooms and through a tightly woven brief, ensures its occupants co-exist comfortably on site. Its intentionally restrained outline instils an ingrained efficiency and a measured approach to each of the gestures that exist between the encompassing walls. With the emphasis flipped and the landscape being key to a successful residential experience, the building itself is pushed upward and is deliberately introspective.

Addressing a five-way intersection, the home and its presentation to the street needed due consideration to ensure it embodied contextual sensitivity. Taking form as a timber and metal clad box, the multi-level home utilises banding to breakdown the overall whole and articulate the façade, while providing a sense of privacy internally. The use of openings and their positioning aims to encourage natural light inward and to optimise orientation as much as possible, ensuring the home’s light-footedness is carried through to the everyday. A light and fresh palette of robust and long wearing materials sees exposed concrete flooring as the base, which steps down to open up the volume of the combined living, dining and kitchen space. Expressed structure and raw textures feature to add detail and depth, interest and warmth.

With the emphasis flipped and the landscape as being key to a successful residential experience, the building itself it pushed upward and is deliberately introspective.

Lambton House is an open conversation with its street and its site, embracing the increasing rareness of landscape space as key to the conjuring of a home. Curious Practice proposes a considered series of gestures that deliberately embrace the site’s potential, through a measured slightness.