AND THE WINNER IS…

Doing great work for a great client is so rewarding. Seeing that work recognised by a jury of our peers is awesome! So happy, then, that our design for the Tongue n Groove showroom has scooped the Best Retail and Best in State prizes at the 2013 Australian Interior Design Awards. In a very real sense, this award recognizes the client’s audaciousness of brief as much as our response to it. At a time when retail is suffering enormously, it is our belief that strong, conceptually coherent design will win the day, forging a path ahead of the pack. As online shopping becomes increasingly common, retail today has to be a total immersion experience.

Thanks to the jury for commending the ‘clarity, assuredness and spirit’ of the project – we take it as the Tobias Partners motto. My thanks also to Edmund Spencer and Pia Wolanski of Tobias Partners for their invaluable input as well as builder Joshua Clapp for the excellence of his craftsmanship.

BELLE OF THE BALL

It’s always a delight to see Tobias Partners’ projects featured in the press. For the affirmation, of course. But also, and even more importantly, for the pleasure of reading the critics’ interpretations of our work. I was particularly thrilled to read Chris Pearson’s insightful interpretation of our recently completed, somewhat sprawling house in Bronte in this month’s Belle magazine. Pearson digs right back to my roots, even before I set up my practice – touring Europe’s classical architectural gems with the late, great interior designer John Coote, and quite rightfully hones in on my fascination with Palladian villas. While this Bronte home is avowedly down-to-earth in its glamour, I gleefully accept Chris’ point about “proportion, scale and gravitas”. Recommended reading.

BOOK LEARNIN’

Last week saw the inauguration of the TP-designed library of the Montessori School in Bondi. Total disclosure number 1: my wife Miranda Darling is, among many other talents, a published author. Total disclosure number 2: my two boys, Samson and Griffin are enrolled as students at this school. These facts made the importance of reading – a reality sometimes relegated to the realm of abstract truism – a total home-grown truth, indeed our focus here at Tobias Partners as we worked on the design and delivery of a key component of this terrific school’s offer.

We are really chuffed to have been able to have made a significant donation to the library through design, documentation and management of the library project. Keeping it simple, we opted for a gridded structure in unfinished ply wood that took full advantage of the natural light flooding into the library precinct of the building. Leaving the room as uncluttered as possible means that the children can interact with the books in an organic rather than regulated manner.

Tony Kay, Deputy Mayor of Waverley, and the school’s principal Bill Conway both seemed to highly enjoy Deborah Abela’s reading from her very excellent Max Remy Spy series. Or perhaps they were happy about the rice paper rolls, donated by that feisty – and generous – entrepreneur, miss Nahji Chu.

(LINK to more images)

IN DA HOUSE

The latest issue of Houses magazine just landed on my desk, and I was delighted to read Adam Haddow’s review of our recently-completed Northern Beaches House. Haddow places NB House in the long tradition emanating from Philip Johnson’s Glass House of 1948 and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House of 1951 – and of course we are honoured to be counted in such lustrous company. It’s a seven-page story, with terrific pictures by Justin Alexander, and – this is something I really like about Houses magazine – several floorplans as well. They also include a full fact sheet of the various subcontractors we use – it’s great to see these excellent craftsmen getting a shout out. Houses magazine issue 91 – out now.

SIGNS OF THE (FINANCIAL) TIMES

I was thrilled to open the London Financial Times last weekend and read food critic Nicholas Lander’s review of Sunny and Ross Lusted’s Bridge Room. Quite rightly, he traces their Asian-inspired cuisine and sense of service to their extensive experience at the Aman resorts. And, like Lander, I am a huge fan of Ross’ sake-marinated john dory! But it’d be falsely modest of me if I didn’t ‘fess up: the bit about the “gorgeously simple, attractive dining room” really put a smile on my face.

BEAUTIFUL DISASTER

For any architect who upholds the essential tenets of Modernism, March is the cruelest month. It was on March 16th 1972 that the first stage demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St Louis took place. I remember watching the video footage as a student, completely mesmerised as the first of 33 eleven-storey rectangular tower blocks imploded. A Corbusier-inspired piece of master planning, the 23 hectare site was designed to provide low-cost housing for (often black, often aged) residents of the Missouri capital. But twenty years after its inauguration, the complex had been allowed to fall into a state way beyond repair.

The demolition was a beautiful disaster; so compelling, despite the message it conveyed re the shortfalls of the Modernist canon. (And it was a disaster that found an echo some thirty years later in the spectacular collapse of New York’s World Trade Centre – by a strange twist of history, Minoru Yamasaki was the architect of both structures.)

But, perhaps even more destructive – at least in the symbolic sense – was the fact that the dynamiting of Pruit-Igoe allowed architectural theorist Charles Jencks to later quip that it marked “the day Modernist architecture died”. In Jenck’s theory, it hailed the beginning of that grab-bag era known as Post Modernism. Thankfully, history proved Jencks wrong – in Sydney’s own Tamarama, the renovation, rather than (often called-for) demolition, of the Corbu-inspired Glenview Court attests to that. Long Live Modernism!

Watch here: VIDEO LINK

DETAILS, DETAILS…

‘God is in the details’ is a quote often attributed to modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but in fact was coined by Gustave Flaubert, the most influential of French naturalist authors. The creator of the nineteenth century masterpiece Madame Bovary was such a stickler for detail that to read his novel is to experience a total immersion in the intricacies of life in small town France. He would even draw up maps of the fictitious streets through which his adulterous shopaholic Emma Bovary would bustle, on the look out for her lover Léon (or was it Rudolphe, or both?)

Now, I’m no Flaubert but I’ve got to say I am captivated by the level of detail we have achieved in one of our most significant projects to date, this private house facing the Pacific ocean. It has become something of a cliché to say that Eastern Seaboard housing is all about spectacular views, and like most clichés in many respects it is true. But with a vis-à-vis of such magnificence it seems to me almost incumbent upon any good architect to rise to the challenge, matching nature’s perfection with whatever ante at hand.

Hewn Western Australian limestone & screen detail on kitchen island.

Pressed render finish on building exterior & metal grille; hand-beaten bronzed door handles.

Courtyard cobble stone wall; honed teak rods on exterior.

Custom designed steel exterior spiral staircase; exposed concrete banding.

JURASSIC PARK

Cooper Park is one of those lush, narrow gullies scattered through Sydney’s hilly topography that you just seem to stumble upon, almost unawares. Dated to the Jurassic age, it is a steep, scrubby isthmus effectively separating Edgecliff from Bellevue Hill. A tiny neighbourhood, sure, but also an intriguing one, so much does it seem to echo with the sounds and sensations of a distant past. Of course, at Tobias Parters one of our priorities – from an ecological, as well as an aesthetic stand point – is to be open to the environment in which we conceive and construct our structures. So, when the client approached us to come up with a four-bedroom family home on a prime Cooper Park plot, we were thrilled.

Essentially, the project is an almost Cubist study in blocks, cascading down a rather steep slope. (In my mind’s eye, as I began the sketches I kept seeing Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, of 1912.) The volumes themselves are derived from the desire to capture views from the minute you enter the family/entertaining areas, to the minute you go to sleep in your room at night. It’s like a total immersion in nature – the boxes, where open to the surrounding Greygums, Bloodwoods and Coast Mahogany are trimmed in brutalist steel I-beams, allowing the eye to smoothly transition from inside-to-out along the North-South axis of the site.

As for the interior – we’ve gone for restrained, but glamorous, bien sûr.

THE BEAT GOES ON

We are proud to have, once again, collaborated with Tongue n Groove timber company.

Why? Because these guys are not only sincerely passionate about their craft – engineered solid oak boarding – but exceptionally innovative about the way they choose to present their product. Having designed their Sydney showroom a year and a half ago, we recently completed work on their Melbourne showroom.

What’s particularly unique about this brief is that the medium is – quite literally – the message. We’re not just designing a display to show off their product, their product is the display, and this fact adds layers of complexity we find really compelling.

We decided on a periscopic schema of aligned boxes – in effect, a system of monumental light wells that funnel light down into the bare, industrial space, across the various rich surface finishes and textures of the product.

A big shout out to Joshua Clapp, the very excellent builder who so beautifully brought our vision to light.

Read what the press has to say: Australian Design Review

WATCH THIS SPACE

Established on the spectacular Cradle Coast of North-West Tasmania almost 20 years ago, Barringwood Park vineyards has turned to Tobias Partners for a plan to take it into the third decade of its existence, and beyond. Sure, we’ll be reconceiving the cellar operations, creating a new restaurant and function component and adding accommodation in the true boutique lodge tradition. But, more than that: we are creating a place for growing, picking, tasting, eating, smelling, listening, watching and also staying. As this year draws to a close, we are thrilled to be moving into the next with such a generous, generative project on our drawing boards.