A Considered Openness – The Boulevard House by Michael Ong Design Office

Words by Bronwyn Marshall
Photography by Derek Swalwell
Build by Dimpat
Interior Design by Michael Ong Design Office
Styling by Bea and Co
The Boulevard House By Michael Ong Design Office Project Feature The Local Project Image 27

Inspired by its location, the open, outwardly directed approach of The Boulevard House is envisaged as a means to connect the interior experience with its surrounding landscape. Michael Ong Design Office integrates framing, contrasts and moving elements that allow a considered immersion of the building within its context.

Making the most of the site’s potential, the extension and renovation works of The Boulevard House create an opportunity for the home to meaningfully engage with its surroundings. Nestled into the established residential suburban fabric of Ivanhoe East, the new works see the rejuvenation of the existing home and the complete overhaul of the connection to its location through a series of openings. Operable elements are cleverly integrated to aid in climate control and comfort and to ensure the home can respond to its environment, as well as being better linked with purpose. Michael Ong Design Office combines a considered refinement with a classically contemporary approach in composing the resulting palette, ensuring a sense of longevity and endurance.

The emphasis of the home as being open and connected carries through to the materiality and palette, where light and muted tones are used throughout, softening the light and creating a calming and sedative front seat to the home’s view beyond.

Built by Dimpat, the Boulevard House spans two levels and sits adjacent the Yarra River and Yarra Flat Parks with the opportunity of optimising enviable associated views. Ensuring a visual and ventilated connection was the driving force of the new works, and reorienting the open planned living, dining and kitchen areas to embrace this connection drove the resulting planning. Emphasising a strong horizontality, the additions all align through a linear connection and create a series offramed and curated apertures toward the garden. As a carving gesture into the overall darkened black form, a timber reveal invites entry into the interior of the home, adding warmth and connecting through a textural variation with the landscape.

The form opens up to allow opportunities for natural ventilation to cool the interior spaces, while louvred elements can be moved, slid or are mechanically operated, allowing the home to breathe. Expressed as part of the architectural language of the form, the louvres add an animation from within the interior and on approach. A similar linear and stepped rhythm is used in the vertical movement across the levels, where lines are celebrated and boldly gesture their function. The emphasis of the home as being open and connected carries through to the materiality and palette, where light and muted tones are used throughout, softening the light and creating a calming and sedative front seat to the home’s view beyond.

As a carving gesture into the overall darkened black form, a timber reveal invites entry into the interior of the home, adding warmth and connecting through a textural variation with the landscape.

The Boulevard House shows how an exercise in expansion and consideration of context can greatly open and reveal hidden elements previously concealed. Through purposefully connecting the interior with its site, Michael Ong Design Office has injected the home with a revised sense and purpose, allowing a meaningful connection between the built and natural to transpire.