The restaurant seen from the north; the base is bluestone.
Restaurant interior with Fritz Hansen chairs, fossilised marble floor and uplighters designed by the architects.
Looking east from the restaurant to the Spirit Bond buildings and new service wing.
More photos can be found
in the version! | Review Sean Pickersgill Photography Farshid Assassi
Allen Jack + Cottier revise the birthplace of Grange Hermitage to attract a new generation of wine buffs to Penfold’s Magill Estate in the Barossa Valley.
Allen Jack + Cottier’s recent Domaine Chandon development in Victoria’s Yarra Valley set a precedent in Australia for the celebration of wine. By creating a strong and determinedly modern ocllecction of buildings, they proved that connoiseurship and contemporary design could complement each other. In their recent development at Penfold’s Magill Estate in Adelaide, they were faced with a potentially more diffiuclt task. Having to provide an elegant restaurant—a showcase for Grange Hermitage—while reviving a complex of semi-derelict 19th century industrial buildings inevitably raises an agenda of how the new work can relate to the old; a dilemma often answered by historical pastiche. Here, however, the architects have constructed a vision of how intelligent, contemporary architecture can relate to the mysterious processes of wine production and appreciation. The myth associated with wine, and with Grange hermitage in particular, are crucial to this. As a site, Magill Estate has a powerful presence in Australia’s history of winemaking. The original winery of Dr Christopher Rawson Penfold and his wife Mary, it was settled in 1844 with over 100 hectares of land under cultivation. This has shrunk to a mere five hectares. As a result, the winery is surrounded by suburban housing of very recent vintage which generally comes from the upper end of the spectrum offered by local building companies. Consequently, the romantic vision of the winery nestled in a bucolic landscape is dispelled when one enters the front gate, as the housing looms large in the approach. A decision to move an avenue of trees along the driveway has unfortunately enhanced this, though it has undoubtedly improved the outlook from the restaurant. The architects, then, were faced with a difficult problem of creating a sense of ‘place’ for exclusive dining in a fundamentally suburban location. Their elegant response is a great credit to them. As a costly part of the project, the architects were required to satisfy the more prosaic requirements of conserving and upgrading existing winemaking facilities which had suffered years of ad hoc development. The were also called on to consolidate the existing office space and provide a modern warehouse. All these facilities have been discretely provided by using the original buildings as a screen for the new warehouse behind. The office areas, on the left on the way to the winery, are painted in the signature Penfold’s grey, which minimises their presence. Because the winemaking facilities at Magill are of minor importance in Penfold’s overall production, their primary purpose now is to be a venue for guided tours and tastings. As a consequence, the public realm is divided into two areas: the village-like collection of heritage buildings remaining from the original winery, and the restaurant itself, which the architects describe as having a “transparent, negative character”; a modernist building which is forward of and separate from the old buildings and perched upon a massive foundation of local bluestone. On arrival, visitors have the choice of proceeding directly up into the heart of the winery or turning right and walking along a large retaining wall to the reastaurant. Guided tours take them through the refurbished cellars to original tasting rooms deep within the hillside. During the tours, visitors can taste almost every Penfold wine, including Grange. While this ‘authentic’ experience of cellar tastings is hardly unique—most wineries provide such a service—there is an implicit suggestion here that Magill Estate is the home of Australia’s premier red wine. While reverence for the making of wines is emphasised in the old winery, the new restaurant celebrates the ritualised appreciation of wine. This distinction is crucial. By drawing a line between the old and the new—production and consumption—the architects make the experience of going to the restaurant all the more self-conscious and overt. There is a highly stylised procession up to the bald, grassy forecourt with its Barragan water element, past a sacred grove of trees to the restaurant. As Adelaide architect and critic Michael Pilkington has recognised, it leads to a temple devoted to the senses. In a society where the idea of the ‘sacred’ is only dimly felt, the middle class pleasure of wine tasting and appreciation is here afforded a status akin to the most special rituals. Formally, the restaurant is a glass pavilion. As such, it inevitably invites comparison with the predcedents of Mies van der Rohe’s work in general and Philip Johnson’s house project for the Kootz Gallery of 1951. His Wiley house of 1953 also placed a glass box on a rubble base. The masonry enclosure of the kitchen and associated facilities to the south provides an anchor and counterpoint to the restaurant’s immateriality, and screens out nearby housing. Yet the architects’ attempt to create a ‘negativity’ against the profusion of nearby buildings is compromised by the shallow curve of the roof. To my mind it is an unnecessary feature which, if anything, serves to highlight an unfortunate current preoccupation in architecture that all things Australian should include a vernacular reference. As indicated previously, I would suggest that the restaurant is more temple than verandah. But this becomes a minor quibble when one moves inside the restaurant and appreciates the sensitivity with which is sets a place for the rituals of dining. It is an exclusive domain, with its luxuriant finishes of glass, travertine and timber veneer. To the east, a water court (screened form the approach to the restaurant) provides an intimate space that contrasts the vista to the west. This dominant westerly view presents the estate’s newly established vines in the foreground; with the rows leading the eye to the Adelaide plains beyond. Sliding glass walls open up to create a sense of intimacy between the diners and the vineyard; on sunnier days, this outlook is tempered by glare-reducing aluminium blinds. The vines, all around 40 years old, were transplanted from the main growing region around Nuriootpa to complete this genteel scene. The restaurant’s interior detailing is immaculate. Like Mies’ cruciform columns in the Barcelona Pavilion, a highly polished chrome finish to the principal structural members diminishes their presence in the space. The book-matched timber veneer on the south and island walls is warm and refined, and works well with the travertine floor. Deep indigo paint adds further richness. although the space is all hard surfaces, it is acoustically very quiet; indeed it feels far more intimate than its dimensions would indicate. As Michael Pilkington has pointed out, this restaurant is typical of the Sydney school bravura of celebrating the pleasure of materials in construction. While this can lead to formalism for its own sake, at Magill Estate Allen Jack + Cottier have instead created a rich and significant place for Epicurean pleasure. Adelaide has some fine modern buildings of the fifties and sixties but a conservative swing towards heritage over the last 20 years tended to stifle innovation and deny the need for architectural responses to the rich complexities of contemporary society. While the Magill Estate restaurant may not have been conceived to specifically achieve this end, it is a valuable argument for the relevance of modernism at the end of the century.
Sean Pickersgill studied and taught at the University of Western Australia and is now a lecturer in architecture at the University of South Australia. PENFOLD’S MAGILL ESTATE, MAGILL, SOUTH AUSTRALIA
Architects (new work) Allen Jack + Cottier—Keith Cottier (project architect), Peter Monckton (design architect), Kerry Fyfe (architect);(restoration of Grange Cottage and garden) Allen Jack + Cottier with Danvers. Structural and civil Engineers Connell Wagner. Electrical and Mechanical Engineers Bestec. Hydraulic Engineers Ashley Hallandel & Associates. Landscape Architects Terragram. Quantity Surveyor Rider Hunt. Restaurant Consultant Anders Ousback. Construction Manager Hansen & Yuncken. Developer Southcorp Wines. |
