Bay View House

by Craig Steere Architects

Craig Steere Architects generated modern architectural forms and volumes which engage harmoniously within its located environment.

Home owners briefed designers the architects on how they wished to create an empathetic relationship with the unique characteristics of the site in which Bay View House is located, which overlooks the natural heritage of Bay View Park in Victoria, whilst interacting with the streetscape and with the adjacent bush trail park.

Intense planning and design from the architects provided a simplistic design which clarifies the spaces throughout, whilst addressing the project brief of the client, which was to develop a building form which is sympathetic to the streetscape, whilst understating its actual scale.

The outcome is a design which reflects that of an aluminium box form, which appears to perch gracefully on a sculptured column and mimics the tree forms of the surrounding park.

The upper floor concrete balustrade provides privacy upstairs and gently unfurls to define the outdoor living and continues deep into the home, in a strategy to draw the exterior to the interior. This design of fluid form by the architects offers the home owners a softened outlook of warm and organic textures, whilst evoking the limestone caves and outcrops of the cliffs beyond.

The ground floor of this family home is an open plan living, dining and kitchen space which diffuses into an external garden and courtyard, with a primary outlook towards the parkland and rive. The upper level of the house; with secondary bedrooms for children and guests, main bedroom, ensuite and dressing, continue to address the site with outlooks strategically framed, and apertures which invite quality sun and breeze.

Cool, crisp edges of feature metal cladding and screens have been counteracted with warm timber cladding and limestone tiling, and the exterior material palette has been carried into the inside with a controlled manner, providing soft light tones, which diffuse natural light deep within the interiors.

The street elevation was carried through into various elements of the interior detailing, providing a soft juxtaposition against a typically linear and occasionally angular plane.

Architects took a lot of consideration into the design of Bay View House, with environmental comforts within the home extending beyond the standard designing architectural forms and elements in order to address orientation and climate control.

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