A Dynamic Balance – North Bondi House by Anthony Gill Architects
The family home of architect Anthony Gill, North Bondi House is located on a challenging corner site on the unceded lands of the Bidjigal, Birrabirragal and Gadigal peoples. A semi-detached house on the northern side of a tight block, the alterations and additions generously open to extensive street frontages whilst carefully renegotiating the home’s shared southern wall. In the resulting arrangement on the site, Anthony Gill Architects skilfully balances the dynamic between the public realm and the private.
For all the beauty and boldness of its street presence, the design ideas that drive North Bondi House are not to be found simply in strong formal and material gestures. Defying the idea of architecture as a static object, the project is more accurately a series of sensitively layered, moveable screens. Such concern for the intricacies of interfaces and negotiations between spaces features across the work of Anthony Gill Architects and, with the provocatively open-handed approach to the edges of North Bondi House, Anthony has demonstrated a deep commitment to the values of his practice.
The addition of a lightweight spotted gum timber box above the home’s existing brick walls generates a delicate, incredibly photogenic departure from the brick and tile material logic of the surrounding suburb through the use of tightly-spaced vertical timber battens. Veiling the perimeter of the upper volume, they offer a set of intriguingly fleeting glimpses of the spaces behind. Operable screens to the lower level of the building make use of the same material language and, Anthony notes, have been carefully set out to slide seamlessly from view when open. “When they were open, I didn’t want to see them,” he explains. “I wanted to see the big opening as if there was nothing, as if the wall could have been opened up onto the garden.” Although the practice had not worked with timber battens before, the screens reflect the architects’ approach to materiality, interest in screens and enjoyment of “interstitial spaces between the edge of the enclosure and then the edge of the building,” Anthony reflects. As his own home, it was “an opportunity to show that [some of these bigger ideas] can be done successfully and be very liveable.”
Working as much as possible with the existing brick structure to reconfigure the ground floor and make space for a third bedroom, the project adds to the floor area only through the modest upper-level extension. Simultaneously, its footprint is reduced slightly in order to bring further natural light into spaces on the shared southern boundary wall.
A relatively small budget helped to sharpen focus and clearly define project priorities early in the design process. “We only had a certain amount of money and knew what we wanted to achieve,” Anthony says.
A relatively small budget helped to sharpen focus and clearly define project priorities early in the design process. “We only had a certain amount of money and knew what we wanted to achieve,” Anthony says. “There are certain things that we really wanted to get right and other stuff where we just wanted to keep it as simple as possible.” In line with this approach, the house combines a series of meticulously detailed, largescale shifting elements across the building envelope with an economical overlapping of program and limited use of built-in joinery.
This attitude is particularly evident in the main ground floor space – a kitchen, dining and lounge area with a piano nestled under the stair. “We wanted to keep the kitchen as simple and direct as possible and reduce the joinery down to almost nothing and expose appliances. It’s as minimal as we could get it – not in an aesthetic sense, but in terms of an approach.” A large fixed-glass window and accompanying sliding timber screen incorporate a series of possible views of this room into the entry sequence on the eastern boundary, which has been further softened through the removal of an existing low brick wall and gate. To the north, this multipurpose room also opens up a second street frontage through a large door that invites occupation at the edge of the house, taking advantage of the slight step up from the courtyard to encourage the dangling of feet and “lots of unexpected chats and connections”.
Along the southern side of the entrance, each of the home’s three bedrooms also connect to small pockets of garden space, with the two larger rooms maintaining engagement with the street through large windows and more established trees. This direct and disarming connection with the suburb does not prevent privacy from being sought when needed, however, with degrees of enclosure controlled through multiple operable layers supported by skylights overhead. Unexpected open relationships between spaces and interstitial zones permeate throughout the plan. Pieces of what would typically be a contained, singular bathroom are periodically absorbed into the hallway, connecting the centre of the ground floor plan to outdoor space and creating a dynamic layer of separation and privacy for the shower cubicle only when needed. Extending this logic, the bath is located on the upper floor of the project, on a northfacing terrace that is open to the sky. For Anthony, this is as much about celebrating the experience of outdoor bathing as it is a practical consideration for a family of four. “We’ve taken the bathroom and pulled it apart, locating it throughout the house in order to try to make it perform. There’s not one bathroom that everyone’s fighting to get into.”
Similarly, the upper floor – like the living and dining space below it – encourages multiple patterns of occupation and use, rather than subscribing to more conventional spatial configurations. “Again, for us it was that idea about program and overlapping things,” Anthony says. Incorporating a laundry alcove within the outdoor terrace encapsulates this approach. “Having a more traditional balcony off a lounge room just felt like a waste of space for us. We didn’t feel like we needed the lounge room to be any bigger, and we liked the idea of these in-between spaces,” he explains. With the terrace behind a substantial timber screen, there is privacy and plenty of natural light but “no real outlook”, becoming an intermediary space that feels neither indoors nor outdoors. “For us, [it’s] great. We might go up there and sort through washing, or someone’s having a bath, or we’re watching the football – it just means it’s a very well-used space.”
Through a series of bold gestures and a commitment to reimagining the relationship between the house and surrounding spaces, North Bondi House presents a compelling argument for a different kind of privacy, considerately renegotiated each day. “Bondi’s a funny suburb,” Anthony reflects. “It’s all over-developed semis, everyone has sacrificed their front doors and entries for carports and garages and things, so you can walk the streets at night, and it’s pitch black apart from the streetlights. No sense of life anywhere but, on our little corner, you get this warm glow that, I think, the neighbours appreciate. We appreciate it. It’s a different attitude, not just to privacy but also to what’s important and to community.”
