2024 Houses Awards: Australian House of the Year

Jury remark

This exemplary dwelling disrupts the well-trodden path of variations to a well-recognized housing sort. It resists the temptation to develop and enlarge, as an alternative containing all that’s wanted for a household of 4 within the footprint of the prevailing employee’s cottage. Quite than consolidating rooms into one open-plan setting, it preserves the intimate scale of the house’s present rooms and introduces fastidiously positioned openings in partitions to allow connection and supervision as required. And fairly than internalising all home area behind a defensive wall, it introduces a loose-fit room, deliberately freed from program, that’s open to each the backyard and the road, enabling the home to converse with the neighbourhood. Now used as a office for the occupants’ structure studio, this shady outside room – ideally suited to the Brisbane local weather – may readily be used for casual dwelling. A big portion of the location is retained for backyard.

Architects’ personal houses are sometimes websites of experimentation – a chance to problem “enterprise as ordinary” pondering. Right here, impressed by the shophouse, the architect-owners have explored how work and household life can virtually coexist, whereas additionally occupying distinct zones of the home. The entry – serving home and studio – is moved away from the busy predominant highway and onto the quieter facet road, preserving home privateness; porosity is graded from the metal mesh-lined public-facing entry circulation to the cocooning bedrooms upstairs; strong concrete and metal within the undercroft give option to superbly completed timber in non-public areas.

In opting to remain throughout the present footprint, in exploring ways in which a personal home area can have interaction with the neighbourhood, and in adopting a loose-fit, long-life ethos that helps the comfortable coexistence of labor and home life, the architects have reframed the home with out eradicating the qualities of the unique. Assured but understated and exquisitely resolved, Crimson Hill Home and Studio is an distinctive instance of the efficiency of doing much less. It’s deservingly named the 2024 Australian Home of the 12 months.

For additional protection see Homes 158.

The Award for Australian Home of the 12 months is supported by Cult. See full picture galleries of all of the profitable and shortlisted initiatives right here