A Return to Place – Skye Residence by Williams Burton Leopardi
Injecting warmth and soul, Skye Residence is the result of a return to base principles through the engagement with the surrounding context, bridging new key connections to place. Williams Burton Leopardi layers varied materiality and texture, opening up the existing to optimise views and allowing elements of the enviable surrounds and siting into the experience of the home.
Located in the elevated and densely natural undulations of the Adelaide Hills, Skye Residence sits both perching and open to its surrounds. Previously blocked off and non-responsive, the original home was built in the 1990s and could have been placed in any location due to its lacking any connection to place. Set as it is an area that has a pull for residents who enjoy an immersion within nature, Skye had the potential to embrace this abundant, lush landscape. Ensuring a connection to those endowments, thus, became a first point of call. Williams Burton Leopardi brings a focus on texture in curating apertures that submerge its residents in place, reminding them of the surrounding greenery.
A home connects its residents and acts as the ultimate place to retreat to and recharge, so it was important that the personality of the occupants shone through in the new works, while still ensuring the home could be opened up with intention. Internally as much as externally, creating access to visual connections and sightlines further aligns with the contemporary residential condition. A newfound openness then also meant an anchoring of the home to its site, and the new works acting as new chapters to its previous narrative. A focus on movement and circulation was also an underlying directive, encouraging an ease of flow within and beyond the building’s bounding edges.
A mid-century sensibility forms an inspired muse for the new works, as a natural response to the owner’s own collection of furniture, objects and artwork. A palette of warm and earthy tones is borrowed from the existing collected and storied pieces and helps form the direction of the new spaces internally. An emphasis on craft further elevates the detail and tactility. Externally, a more monochromatic and textural approach frames the various openings and entry sequence, expressing the structural elements as it sits low and lean, hugging the site. On approach, the home feels small and embedded within its site, however, when within it, the views and its siting reveal the steep slope to the rear, endowing uninterrupted views outwards.
Through drawing on emotive cues and the creation of key connections, Skye Residence openly embraces its site and enviable outlook. Williams Burton Leopardi enacts pivoted gestures that elevate the everyday.
