Calming Introspection – Perry House by A For Architecture
With an introspective focus, Perry House emerges as a considered insertion in place, respectfully engaging with the surrounding context while defining its own residential offering through composure. A for Architecture Founder and Director Anna Rozen’s insightful, restrained approach underpins the resulting home, imbuing its indoor and outdoor spaces with an innate calming quality.
Perry House stands as a counter to increasing urban sprawl and the perceived need for larger homes. Stacking its amenity over multiple levels, the formal composition on site resists the need to touch each boundary edge like its neighbours and instead defines itself by its restraint. “The garden and house become a sanctuary away from the outside world,” describes Anna. “The new building form needed to block and shield any potential views from surrounding homes, resulting in the U-shape on site.” The carving of an internal courtyard creates a safe harbour for the garden and pool, ensuring they feel protected, encased by the built form and distinctly disconnected from the surrounds.
As a balance to the bustle of their everyday, the clients needed their home to be a place of calm. “It was important that the new home felt like a sanctuary away from their busy lives,” Anna says, “and while a minimalist design approach was favoured, we were conscious that the resulting home could feel sterile – at its core, we needed the house to feel like a home.” As such, the right balance needed to be struck between personal expression and order. “While we were aware of the remnants of everyday life always being present,” she explains, “we also wanted to conceal as much of the mess and clutter behind cleverly designed cabinetry.” Meanwhile, the brick materiality provides a sense of protection in its weightiness and warmth in its texture that is both calming and pleasingly familiar, as befitting a family home.
The connections between the inside and the private outdoor landscaped areas are key to creating this prevailing sense of calm. Capturing the animation of family life, clear lines of sight through long linear corridors and expansive glazing ensure the home feels private and yet internally bound. Facing north, the courtyard becomes the epicentre of the home, with living zones wrapping around this central element. “Full-height frameless glass windows blur the boundary between inside and out,” Anna describes, “so that the pool becomes an integral part of the interior space – light then bounces off the surface of the water and plays across the travertine floors.” The arrangement of living elements around the open spaces reflects how the family live and what they value, allowing the outdoor spaces to become rooms of their own, as places to gather and connect.
Understood as a connected whole, Perry House sees A for Architecture minimise the changes in materiality and form across the site to reinforce the overall integrity of the design.
The openness of the interior is balanced by the generous use of brick. “The living room and outdoor entertaining areas at the rear of the property are designed within an overarching brick colonnade form that continues seamlessly from inside to out,” describes Anna. “We selected a concrete brick from National Masonry, and through extensive experimentation, several different brick patterning techniques were selected to give individual identity to the key built forms that generate the arrangement of the house.” Built by its owner, who had no previous building experience, there remains a strong vein of experimentation evidenced throughout – “both with materials and differing patterns,” Anna says. Additionally, “cost control was also always going to be a key consideration for Perry House. Through strong consultation and involvement in the finish selections and throughout the design process, the family can see their own tastes reflected in both the surfaces and textures, and in the items that they engage with every day.”
Materials become a signature of Perry House, with the concrete brick, travertine and charred timber coalescing, their inherent contrast and textural diversity adding a certain depth to the family home and layers for natural light to interact with. Complementing the courtyard as an open breathing connector to the natural world, skylights sit above, bringing light deeper into the home. “A long linear skylight, running the length of the living room, provides a subtle wash of daylight down the brick walls, emphasising the texture of the walls and softly lighting the space,” Anna says. “Skylights have been used in a similar way elsewhere in the project to wash daylight down the wall surfaces, thereby providing a softer light.”
The connections between the inside and the private outdoor landscaped areas are key to creating this prevailing sense of calm.
Light and its engagement with the home then becomes a key contributor to the quality of the interior spaces and to the wellbeing of the occupants. “Light plays a crucial role in our designs,” Anna says, “how it reflects on different materials and textures, and how it can change the feeling of a room across the course of the day and across the seasons.” Throughout, differing approaches to light have aligned with the function of a space and its intended feel. Where the living room needed a sense of enclosure and intimacy, Anna says, “the light in the kitchen and dining, however, has been intentionally considered differently, to contrast against the adjacent areas.”
Understood as a connected whole, Perry House sees A for Architecture minimise the changes in materiality and form across the site to reinforce the overall integrity of the design. “This use of a singular material for both internal and external application helps to blur the boundary between inside and out and enhance the connection of the house to the garden,” Anna concludes. The outcome of this approach ensures a constant connection to the natural environment, the courtyard garden protected from the busy city beyond by the embrace of strong brick walls that competently hold the ebb and flow of life within.
