Rose Bay House by Fearon Hay

A Sydney harbourfront family home defies boundaries, blending lightness with solidity and privacy with openness, even amid the fiercest storms.

Fearon Hay’s design for a large family home in the harbourside Sydney suburb of Rose Bay seemingly performs a series of illusions. It manages to be light and solid at the same time; it’s private and simultaneously overlooked; it appears to have an open-plan configuration, as well as clearly defined spaces, and it is often hard to tell where the house starts and the garden ends. There’s another magic trick it perfectly executes: on the day The Local Project visited, Sydney was experiencing some of its heaviest rainfall in recent years. While it seemed like the end of the world outside, inside there was calm and quiet, with the doors of the ground-floor terrace wide open with almost no regard for the weather. It’s the truest test of a house as refuge.

From the street, it looks monolithic and almost windowless – like a block of stone jutting out from the tree canopy.

Rose Bay House, which was completed in 2020, sits on a corner block sunken from the street, with another property between it and the harbour foreshore. From the street, it looks monolithic and almost windowless – like a block of stone jutting out from the tree canopy. A series of onyx slabs are laid into a blackened stainless-steel frame that wraps the dwelling and appears to be suspended from the edge of the roof. The translucent stone panels provide privacy and volume while also allowing dappled light into the interior. “The house, at its essence, has this conflict between being both solid and light,” says Tim Hay, co-founder of Fearon Hay. “We wanted a house that was embedded into the ground, but we also wanted it to be in balance. We wanted the lightness to be able to contribute to the architectural form without conflicting with the sense of solidity.”

The architects experimented with a range of materials before settling on onyx. “We played around with various things to establish how we could have the permeance of stone that would also provide lightness,” says Hay. “We came to the site with a number of samples and held them up to the light. And there was this moment when the light that was dappled through the trees came through one of the samples, and it was at that moment where we said, ‘This is going to fulfil our ambitions with this design.’”

“The house, at its essence, has this conflict between being both solid and light,” says Tim Hay, co-founder of Fearon Hay.

“That was a fairly major moment where the concept came to life,” adds Jeff Fearon, co-founder of Fearon Hay. “We do renders for clients and all sorts of simulations and put them in [virtual reality] goggles and make them pretend they’re in [the] spaces. But being on site with a piece of material was one of the most powerful experimentations we could take our clients through. We love that experimentation as part of our process with our clients, where we can share ideas even if they’re not completely formed.”

Set among established trees at the northern end of Rose Bay, the building’s floor plan is U-shaped, opening to an eastern courtyard at the rear and a broad terrace to the west that looks out to the postcard view of Sydney Harbour. Placed back from the street, the eastern courtyard brings morning sun into the living areas and is the main point of arrival. To enter, you descend from the road through the garden and a series of small courtyards before you get to the main living space through a large glass pivot door. The journey through the house – from the street, through the garden and to the main living room – is almost imperceptible.

The journey through the house – from the street, through the garden and to the main living room – is almost imperceptible.

A sense of sanctuary and privacy has been achieved in the design through the architecture but also through the landscape design by Paul Bangay. “Combining the architecture and the landscaping and the way the garden stitches with the built form is something that is really important to us,” says Hay. “The house was designed not to have a heavy masonry structure that rises up from the ground, but to be more or less floating shelves that sit over the gardens. We wanted to create a sense of coming under foliage and then suddenly finding yourself under a suspended piece of stone.” The genius of Bangay’s work is that it shields the abode from neighbours while also allowing light from every aspect inside. At the same time, it manages to create the impression that there is nothing between the building and the waterfront view.

The clients wanted a house with a flexible floor plan that could accommodate large-scale entertaining but also be intimate. “We didn’t want to have a plan that was completely open in all directions,” says Fearon. “There was a division of spaces that needed to occur, but we didn’t want to contain them with doorways. But we also didn’t want a plan that was completely open and sort of free space.” Spaces were, therefore, defined through use of materials, internal finishes, double- height volumes and glazing. The result is a home with a sense of scale fit for a party of 100 people but can simultaneously be small and comforting when there’s just two. A magic trick.

Architecture by Fearon Hay. Interior design by Penny Hay. Landscape design by Paul Bangay. Natural stone flooring by Eco Outdoor.