Nine books featuring Australian residential architecture

From multi-generational living to fancy felines with a taste for contemporary interior design, we round up nine books featuring Australian residential architecture for your summer reading.

Architecture at the Heart of the Home
By Jan Henderson and Dianna Snape (Thames and Hudson, 2021)

Architecture at the Heart of the Home by Jan Henderson and Dianna Snape (Thames and Hudson, 2021).

Architecture at the Heart of the Home by Jan Henderson and Dianna Snape (Thames and Hudson, 2021).

Image: Thames and Hudson

Long-time friends Jan Henderson and Dianna Snape have teamed up for this survey of 22 Australian houses, which focuses on those parts of the home that people naturally gravitate to – the “heart” that gives the book its title. The writer-and-photographer team visited the houses in 2020, dodging bushfires and lockdowns in a whirlwind tour of some of the best new houses around the country, most of which have not been published before. At Caroline House by Kennedy Nolan, the heart of the home is a circular pool around which the home wraps. This is “where the family gathers, where parties occur and solitary moments are spent.” At Bio-Courtyard House by Designinc and Hole-in-the-Roof House by Neeson Murcutt and Neille, the courtyard is the heart; at K House by Renato D’Ettorre Architects it’s an alcove seat on the terrace; and at Contemplation House by Virginia Kerridge Architect it’s the sparse room at the centre of the plan set aside for meditation. The metaphor is pushed to its limits at times – at Pine Flat Lodge by Room 11, “the home itself becomes the heart” of its wild Tasmanian surrounds – but overall it offers a compelling way to understand these homes and to reflect on what we value in domestic architecture.

Come Together: The architecture of multigenerational living
Edited by Gestalten and Joann Plockova (Gestalten, 2021)

Come Together: The architecture of multigenerational living edited by Gestalten and Joann Plockova (Gestalten, 2021)

Come Together: The architecture of multigenerational living edited by Gestalten and Joann Plockova (Gestalten, 2021)

Image: Gestalten

With rising real-estate prices outpacing incomes in many cities around the world – not least in Australia – many young people are being priced out, while their grandparents are facing a lack of affordable, quality care. This is the “perfect storm” that is leading many to embrace multigenerational living. Come Together features a range of essays, profiles and case studies that explore the many ways of designing for multiple generations. There’s an update on the classic Australian granny flat at Austin Maynard Architects’ Charles House in Melbourne, where the flat can easily adapt from a communal living space to a self-contained apartment. There’s the innovative Copper Lane cohousing project in London, designed by Henley Halebrown, where six groups – previously strangers – pooled resources to build a shared housing complex. And there’s C. F. Møller Architects’ Future Sølund project in Copenhagen, where 360 nursing home units combine with 150 apartments for young people, showing how “young people and the elderly can live inclusively and in harmony.” The architecture and housing models presented in Come Together take many forms, but what they share is flexibility, inclusivity and a sense of optimism about how we can live together.

Where They Purr: Creative interiors and the cats who call them home
By Paul Barbera (Thames and Hudson, 2021)

Where They Purr: Creative interiors and the cats who call them home by Paul Barbera (Thames and Hudson, 2021).

Where They Purr: Creative interiors and the cats who call them home by Paul Barbera (Thames and Hudson, 2021).

Image: Thames and Hudson

In a heritage-listed terrace transformed by Sydney’s Atelier Dau, Wolfgang, Minnie and Zaza happily prowl among an eclectic collection of furniture and Dutch and Australian art. At a Toorak apartment designed by B.E Architecture, Pud, a seven-month-old Burmese, tests his balance climbing into the many elegant lampshades. And at a modern home designed by Piccolo Architecture, five-year-old British shorthair Diego spends his time climbing where he shouldn’t – on Italian chairs and cashmere blankets – perhaps embodying the rebellious spirit of his namesake, the Mexican communist artist Diego Rivera. A book as much about cats as it is interiors, Where They Purr features twenty-eight houses where fancy felines enjoy luxurious lives. Australian-born, New York-based photographer Paul Barbera has braved scratches, patiently waited for cats to re-emerge from under beds and mastered the art of photographing a black cat on a cloudy day in order to produce the images that bring the book to life. The result is a lively coffee table book that revels in the enigmatic charm of its feline subjects, while also showing off a great variety of interior design – from mid-century-inspired apartments to a sleek, contemporary farmhouse.

Reclaimed: New homes from old materials
By Penny Craswell (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2022)

Reclaimed: New homes from old materials by Penny Craswell (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2022).

Reclaimed: New homes from old materials by Penny Craswell (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2022).

Image: Thames and Hudson Australia

Penny Craswell’s latest coffee table book isn’t just about enviable interiors and eye-catching design – it also has an agenda. Craswell calls on designers and prospective home builders to consider the environmental impact of their build and embrace reclaimed and recycled materials. Focusing on four key materials – brick, timber, metal and reconstituted waste – Reclaimed features 24 homes from around the world that employ re-used materials. At Studio Bright’s 8 Yard House in Melbourne, reclaimed bricks give a new home on an old street a welcome sense of history. At Matt Elkan Architect’s Smash Repair House in Sydney, recycled timber is used for windows and doors, and throughout the interiors. Elkan explains that recycled timber has advantages beyond sustainability: “Older hardwood is usually much more stable than freshly cut
timber due to its much lower moisture content.” And for his own home in South London, architect Matt Barnes of CAN made use of a slightly less traditional material: plastic. The bright, po-mo kitchen features alternating blue and grey benches made from old plastic chopping boards and bottle tops. Hopefully, Reclaimed will inspire others to build a house using something that might otherwise end up in the tip.

Catching Light: The architecture of Iwan Iwanoff –Through the lens of Jack Lovel
(Designed by Studio Baker, 2021)

Catching Light: The architecture of Iwan Iwanoff –Through the lens of Jack Lovel
(Designed by Studio Baker, 2021)

Catching Light: The architecture of Iwan Iwanoff –Through the lens of Jack Lovel (Designed by Studio Baker, 2021)

Image: Jack Lovel

If Sydney is synonymous with Harry Seidler, Melbourne with Robin Boyd and Canberra with the Griffins, then Perth is the city of Iwan Iwanoff. The Bulgarian-born, European-trained architect emigrated to the Western Australian capital in 1950, where he would develop his unique modernist architecture over a 30-year career, helping to shape the suburban landscape and the city’s nascent design culture. This new book of photography from Jack Lovel, who grew up in Iwanoff’s Jordanoff House (1954), lovingly captures some of the architect’s best-preserved works – mainly houses scattered across Perth’s northern suburbs, along with the Northam Library and Administrative Offices (1974), a rare foray by Iwanoff into public architecture. As Stuart Harrison writes in the introduction to Catching Light, Lovel’s photographs capture the progression of Iwanoff’s work from “straight-down-the line 1950s modernism” to the sculptural, expressive concrete blockwork designs that characterized his later work. Realized in full colour, in contrast to the book’s moody cover image, Lovel’s photos are filled with the bright, harsh light that Iwanoff’s architecture used so effectively, “catching it on the outside and playing with it.”

The New Queensland House
By Cameron Bruhn and Katelin Butler (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2022)

The New Queensland  House by Cameron Bruhn  and Katelin Butler (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2022).

The New Queensland House by Cameron Bruhn and Katelin Butler (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2022).

Image: Thames and Hudson Australia

Taking Queensland as its setting and the architect-designed home as its subject, this book tells the latest chapter in the story of the sun-drenched state’s architecture. Picking up on the various threads that make up Queensland’s bespoke regionalism – timber-and-tin weatherboards, mid century experiments in modernism and a splash of postmodernism – The New Queensland House describes a contemporary architectural atmosphere that has embraced the landscape and the climate. Cameron Bruhn and Katelin Butler (former and current editorial directors of Architecture Media) present 28 houses that exemplify the contemporary architectural condition. La Scala by Richards and Spence is a celebration of outdoor living that builds on the example of Donovan Hill’s 1998 C House. Nielsen Jenkins’s Mt Coot-Tha Hous draws on late-modernist ideas to connect with its bushland setting. And Zuzana and Nicholas’s Annerley House continues the experiments with roof form seen in projects such as Don Watson’s 1980s Campbell House. With an evocative foreword by Brisbane-born novelist David Malouf, insightful essays and thoughtful presen-tation, The New Queensland House tells its story well.

Beaumaris Modern 2
By Fiona Austin and Simon Reeves (Melbourne Books, 2022)

Beaumaris Modern 2 by Fiona Austin and Simon Reeves (Melbourne Books, 2022)

Beaumaris Modern 2 by Fiona Austin and Simon Reeves (Melbourne Books, 2022)

Image: Melbourne Books

Melbourne’s bayside suburb of Beaumaris has changed a lot since the 1950s and ’60s, when dirt roads and sandy tracks weaved between untouched bush and the avant-garde homes of the architects and artists who flocked there in search of an alternative to the usual subdivision. Today, as land values have skyrocketed, many of the experimental, modernist homes that were built in the mid-twentieth century have been demolished, replaced by generic new builds. This follow-up to 2018’s Beaumaris Modern continues the work of document-ing the homes that have survived the waves of development, acting as a pointed reminder of what first attracted people to the suburb. The new book brings 17 additional surviving houses “out from behind the trees,” including lovingly preserved homes by the likes of Peter McIntyre, Anatol Kagan and Geoffrey Woodfall as well as hidden gems by lesser-known architects such as Charles Bricknell and Judith Brine. A few of these homes have been in the same family for generations, but most others have been bought by new owners who appreciated their modernist design and relationship to the surrounding bush. We hope, as do the book’s authors, that Beaumaris Modern 2 inspires the suburb’s next generation to hang on to that modernist heritage.

Arent & Pyke: Interiors Beyond the Primary Palette
By Juliette Arent and Sarah-Jane Pyke (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2022)

Arent & Pyke: Interiors Beyond the Primary Palette by Juliette Arent and Sarah-Jane Pyke (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2022

Arent & Pyke: Interiors Beyond the Primary Palette by Juliette Arent and Sarah-Jane Pyke (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2022

Image: Thames and Hudson Australia

Juliette Arent and Sarah-Jane Pyke of Sydney interiors practice Arent and Pyke don’t do mono chrome. Colour is integral to this, their first monograph, just as it is to their work – from the variegated greens that connect a house to its garden to the soft pink that gives a room a rosy glow. The book concentrates on the practice’s residential work, and it celebrates the ways that colour can create visceral joy. “For us, to talk about colour is to talk about memory, but also meaning, energy and emotion,” explain the authors. Each house is introduced with the expected data – floor area, number of bedrooms – as well as the number of colours used. There are 11 colours in the first project, an opulent home by the sea in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, where cream-and-grey marble sits alongside rich crimson fabrics. In the next – a renovated Federation-era worker’s cottage – there are seven, including the mossy green of the living room sofa, which defines the house’s earthy palette. Juliette and Sarah-Jane, who provide insightful commentary on their design decisions throughout, explain that for them, colour is a continual source of inspiration that can evoke particular moods and shape the experience of a space. Above all, it can create joy.

Tasmania Living: Quiet, Conscious Living in Australia’s South
By Joan-Maree Hargreaves and Marita Bullock (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2022)

Tasmania Living: Quiet, Conscious Living in Australia’s South by Joan-Maree Hargreaves and Marita Bullock (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2022)

Tasmania Living: Quiet, Conscious Living in Australia’s South by Joan-Maree Hargreaves and Marita Bullock (Thames and Hudson Australia, 2022)

Image: Thames and Hudson Australia

Tasmania, Joan-Maree Hargreaves and Marita Bullock write, is a place where nature looms large, where cities and towns are diminutive and the open sky “offers an encounter with the immense.” Against this dramatic backdrop, Tasmania Living takes us on a tour of a diverse group of homes, from a restored Greek Revival villa to a Farnsworth House-esque glass holiday home, and tells the stories of their occupants. The authors note that the houses highlight the “art of living quietly” in the natural environment, while demonstrating a sensitivity to Tasmania’s history. They reflect on the brutal realities of colonialism and consider how living consciously on lutruwita/Tasmania today entails hearing and recognizing the Palawa as the ongoing owners of the land. However, given its focus on “asking bigger questions about our place and purpose,” the
book is noticeably quiet on the housing affordability crisis battering the island – a crisis at least partially driven by a market that prioritizes prestige projects over affordable housing. Despite this blind spot, this is a thoughtful work that encourages contemplation and reflection. It is also a handsome book filled with breathtaking scenery and exceptional architecture.

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