House Within
Hidden behind a veil of concrete masonry from Brickworks, House Within by Panov—Scott transforms a suburban Sydney home into an utterly private modern sanctuary.
For architects Anita Panov and Andrew Scott of Panov—Scott, this project offered the opportunity for a unique reimagining of the typical suburban home. “If we thought of the house as a diagram, it’s quite literally a house within,” Panov says. “So we’ve got a walled garden and within that sits the home.”
The residence is therefore more contemplative and inward-looking, offering a calm, private retreat from the surrounding suburban streetscape. “It relates to the context and to the neighbourhood in a very specific way, which is about protecting and making a secure and private place within, but then also to bring the garden and the life of the environment into the house as well,” Scott adds.
At the centre of the project is the Concrete Masonry Grey Block from Austral Masonry, available through Brickworks. Used as an exterior veil, the humble block becomes far more than just structural – it operates as a privacy screen, a walled garden and a filter for natural light. “The screen does something to the house so that it changes the relationship between the interior and the world beyond,” he says. “It allows us to use a lot more glass. The spaces within can actually become a lot brighter.”
That interplay between solidity and openness defines the home. Behind the raw and unadorned masonry shell, the interiors open up as bright, gallery-like spaces with a minimal palette of concrete, galvanised steel and blackbutt timber. Expanses of glazing bring in plenty of light and allow the surrounding native garden, designed by Bushy Landscapes, to feel like part of the home itself.
As the client is an artist, the residence also accommodates a soaring double-height studio, which acts as a reflective sanctuary for creativity. Playful artworks by Jonny Niesche, Kaws, CJ Hendry and others add moments of colour and personality to the interiors, and also reinforce the home’s gallery-like atmosphere.
Sustainability and reuse were also important factors. Existing exterior bricks were salvaged and carefully reused for the driveway, paired with new Brickworks pavers selected to closely match their earthy pink and terracotta tones. “There’s a slight difference and so that’s been actually placed together in a way in which there’s a kind of pattern that emerges between the old and the new,” Scott says.
For the architects, the enduring appeal of the concrete block is in its sense of permanence. “We’ve used the block from Brickworks now on a number of projects and it’s a fantastic material in that it has an amazing longevity,” he explains. “It’s unadorned, so it’s not coated. It has an amazing robustness to it.” In House Within, that durability also becomes, in a way, unexpectedly delicate – screening light, framing gardens and creating a calm, protected world hidden within suburban Sydney.
