Naples Street House by Edition Office
Located in Box Hill, Victoria, Naples Street House is a well-directed configuration of spaces, tones and textures. One of the owners is a keen dancer and consequently, the family home sets the scene for a harmonious performance with rooms and outward connections carefully arranged for easy movement.
Naples Street House occupies a small footprint on its site, embracing an intimate relationship with nature. In a suburb where interwar-era houses are slowly disappearing, the home, which sits alongside narrow townhouses, provides the street with an unconventional visual intervention – an outcome driven by the clients’ aspirations.
For Kim Bridgland, director of Edition Office, this project offers sanctuary. “The house is located within a dense suburban street and is designed to focus inwards, around an inner courtyard garden room,” he explains. The courtyard house typology stemmed from the brief for a multigenerational home. Exploring the types of floor plans suitable for such occupancy led the team to a design that separates the home’s spaces in a way that allows them to remain visually connected through an inner garden room yet hidden from public sight.
Contrastingly, the home is theatrical in spirit and bold in appearance, commanding attention. “One of the clients is a dancer, who utilises almost every space within the home as a context from which to move and dance within,” says Kim. With this reasoning comes a natural sense of wanting the home to shift and change as a set would over a performance’s duration, and Edition Office designed custom furnishings to allow for this versatility. “We were commissioned to design the stainless-steel dining table on rolling castors, along with a sofa that can be moved on wheels and reassembled in numerous configurations, allowing the clients to continually play and redefine how they live within the house,” says Kim.
“[The kitchen] connects directly to the dining and living spaces, and then opens outwards onto every aspect of the house through that central courtyard so it was important to have appliances that gave us a strong sense of design freedom so that the experiential and social qualities – the atmosphere of the home – could be the things we celebrate,” says Kim.
An axial hallway connects sightlines from the front entry to the rear garden and splits the living areas from the bedrooms and bathrooms while leading to a north-facing living, kitchen and dining space. Further into the dwelling is the central garden room and a secluded lounge with fully glazed walls that open to the landscape. “The house is designed for circulation to flow around the central courtyard, interacting with the rise and fall of the roof form,” says Kim of the floor plan. He adds that, alongside the choice of materials, this layout was driven by environmental factors. “The central courtyard allows northern sun to penetrate deep into the living spaces of the home during winter, passively warming the thermal mass of the burnished concrete floors.”
Almost every room relates to the courtyard, and the kitchen, which acts as a “fulcrum point within the social heart of the home,” Kim says, signifies a particularly nuanced illustration of this. Further, given the kitchen’s prominence in both plan and experience, it was essential that the framework and its key elements align with the home’s overarching design rationale. “[The kitchen] connects directly to the dining and living spaces, and then opens outwards onto every aspect of the house through that central courtyard so it was important to have appliances that gave us a strong sense of design freedom so that the experiential and social qualities – the atmosphere of the home – could be the things we celebrate,” says Kim.
Fisher & Paykel’s integration capabilities and design-forward contemporary range were integral to this sense of design freedom. For example, the refrigerator, freezer, dishwasher and rangehood are discreetly integrated into the spotted gum plywood cabinetry, which sits quietly within the architecture. Conversely, the oven and the cooktop, which are part of the contemporary range and feature stainless steel accents, are notable features. The cooktop sits flush within the sleek, stainless-steel countertop and complements the broader material palette of timber, concrete and brick.
This flexible and hardworking kitchen belies its minimal expression and compact footprint. There is a distinct sense of resolve and restraint in this crucial part of the home, and it is doubly as impressive given Naples Street House’s multigenerational groundings. A high level of amenity and utility is elegantly encompassed within this corner kitchen; a testament to Edition Office and Fisher & Paykel’s shared understanding of the demands of the contemporary kitchen and a marker of the value in design-centric liveability.
In contrast to the interior, the exterior is wrapped in brick cladding, which extends over the roof and into the central courtyard. “This singular material presents the house as a carved solid entity, formally mimicking the urban diagram of the low-slung pitched roof forms of the original interwar houses of the neighbourhood,” says Kim. The longevity of the carbon-neutral bricks contributes to the project’s small carbon footprint, and the hardwood plywood lining the walls within is sustainably and locally sourced.
While there is considered thinking behind every one of the project’s elements, the house is designed for the lives within it. Staged for life’s changing routines, the home is flexible, indulges in dramatic moments and provides many places to pause and linger in the sun. As Kim says, Naples Street House is based on “theatre, movement, expression and performance”. The crisp, defined forms, clean lines and richly contrasting materials exemplify this inspiration.
Architecture, interior design and styling by Edition Office. Build by Format Group. Landscape by Florian Wild. Engineering by Measure Engineering.
