Project Journal

With its north-facing central courtyard, this new house draws on a modern beachside aesthetic and prioritises connections to both the garden and wider site. Multiple outdoor spaces are sensitively placed for use throughout the day and year, while a curved concrete seat wrapped in greenery is substituted for a front fence to create a meaningful connection to the street. Its refined yet hard-wearing, robust materials are suited to holiday use – combined with the garden, they allow the building to blend in with its surroundings over time.

Modest in size, the design for this house makes the most of the whole site in its beautiful Queensland setting. A north-facing courtyard is carved out to allow for year-round occupation, while open, porous edges create rich intermediary spaces between indoors and out. The focus is then on quality over quantity in the project’s detailing and materiality.

A touch of Patagonia comes to urban Balmain, in-keeping with the food offering in what is an existing heritage building. The refurbishment makes use of colour in strong, distinctive and meaningful ways ­– a concrete ribbon, for example, delineates new functional space. Textured interiors also add to the atmosphere, while outdoor dining on the corner is designed to activate and bring life to the site.

With a connected garden at its heart, this new house design ties together both heritage aspects seen from the street-front and off-form concrete on the inside. Set within the Byron Bay heritage conservation area, the design sensitively takes local vernacular cues in the roof, balcony and materiality. Three pavilions form the indoor areas, whose thresholds then blur into and connect with the outside spaces.

Semi-buried into the hillside of this Byron Bay hinterland site, the cabins are designed to sit harmoniously within the landscape. Beautiful views extend over the rolling hills, and an alluring, tactile palette of materials – red rammed earth walls with concrete roof gardens – combine for a special visitor experience. 

This unification of two heritage terraces into a single retail site addresses level changes in two directions – from front to rear and across the street-front entries. The heritage envelope is retained and enhanced but, internally, transformational architectural interventions revolve around the creation of a large, central lightwell for both light and circulation. A sculptural parking structure to the rear features a garden on its roof, with a large existing tree acting as a stunning focal point.

The dynamic reimagination of this ocean-facing site sees the creation of a lower ground-floor defined by a series of sinuous rammed earth walls and their carved-out openings. Nestled into the coastal heathland with water views, the house’s materiality is deliberately robust and low-maintenance: timber portal frames, richly clad in native Spotted Gum shiplap, complement the earthy tones and connect with the local bushland, while galvanised steel detailing for doors, windows and hoods completes the palette.

Set on a stunning rural property in the Byron Bay hinterland, this fire space captures the architectural essence of a unique corner of the site. The deceptively simple design juxtaposes local bushrock stone with smooth concrete for the seat, grounding the structure in its local setting while delicately crafting its materiality. The result is a special setting with views out towards the lighthouse. 

Set close to Parliament House on one of Canberra’s most beautiful streets, a dynamically reorientated and sculpted form replaces the existing house. Ground-floor living spaces take their cues from a series of courtyards which, combined with the elevated gardens and their views over Red Hill, truly bring the outdoors inside. A curved wall by the front door invites the visitor inside, where neat mortar finishes contrast strikingly with the highly textured, rough slag mortar walls outside.

A small brick tower rises as a complementary modern addition to this 1960s Californian brick bungalow set on a steeply sloping block. Having removed a poorly designed lean-to at the rear, the original house’s rich character is retained and a new, north-facing courtyard transforms the site with its connection to the outside. The existing materiality and the curved front elevation of the house inspire the softly detailed brickwork, while the main living space features a beautiful – and unexpected – sculpted ceiling with a large skylight.

A unique Australian interpretation of the classic French farmhouse, this dwelling celebrates contextually rich materials with its rammed earth walls and corrugated tin roof. It’s built around the quiet sanctuary of a central courtyard and, while views run internally in this direction, they also extend outwards all directions – a feature maximised by small openings framing each stunning view. The design creates connections both visual and physical, including towards the original cottage.

Marked by the individual names of Barangaroo and Bennelong, thousands of years of human occupation create a layering of history. The competition entry attempts to poetically reconcile disparate historical and cultural ideas in an architecture whose sinuous form seemingly has no beginning and no end. The void created where rough, sawn sandstone almost meets a polished granite wall creates, alongside the presence of water, a tension that acts as an invitation to make a personal, reconciliatory connection to place.

Thermal mass is an important consideration here in the often-cold climate of Yass, NSW. The new dwelling reuses brick from a pre-existing structure for its base, which is then placed in an alluring contrast with the charred timber cladding, tin roofing and concrete. Planned as a series of pavilions with a courtyard garden at the centre, the house also allows for flexibility and privacy by closing areas off when required.

Drawing on Australian rural vernacular with its low horizontal forms and open verandahs, this hilltop residence is designed to be a comfortable multigenerational family retreat. A locally significant and robust material palette includes corrugated iron and rammed earth, as well as glass and concrete. Commanding views take in the coast from Byron Bay to Lennox Head, but an elegant sheltered courtyard garden provides a more private counterpoint at the centre.

A long, linear plan allows this new, two-level house to nestle into its surrounding landscape overlooking Mount Duval in NSW’s New England region. With its climate of extreme cold and high winds, the materials are robust and hardy, while roof-top gardens feature native grasses. The overall result is a rationally planned house that also connects to its locality.

A significant modern addition to an existing century-old farmhouse draws on the architectural language of the homestead to craft a respectful, refined and rigorously detailed new wing. Rooted in its local setting, this is a working farm and the period detailing of the existing property is carefully restored, while field stone is reused for the new building. An elegant glass chute connects the old and new, with the latter also designed to house an extensive contemporary art collection.

Evoking an atmosphere of rural camping, the design for this fishing shack on the banks of the Hawkesbury River provides accommodation for sleeping, cooking, bathing and living. Reusing salvaged materials from the original structure, it deliberately divides the spaces into separate pavilions only to then connect them all the more richly via a large outdoor deck.

Set on a dramatically steep site which drops some 30 metres from street level to water-front, the façade design for this house focuses on flexibility and openness to maximise the stunning water views. Uses are zoned by level, with garaging at street entry and the main living areas placed amidst a canopy of beautiful lemon-scented gum trees.

Baseball batting cages, secret doors and a luxurious collaboration room are just some of the unique touches in this Chicago office fit-out. Achieving a sense of both playfulness and sophistication up on the fifth floor of a grand old warehouse, the architectural response centres on the bold insertion of a black plywood box to spatially delineate functional zones.

Concrete meets sandstone in the architectural design for this compact house overlooking the Hawkesbury River. The stark, cube-like form cantilevers dramatically over a large sandstone rock, while zinc cladding is then used to soften the building’s presence among the eucalypts.

Conveying what it feels like to be in the lush, flat former dairy pasture landscape, this genre-bending building – also designed to take on a second life as a café and meeting space – does so much more than the typically temporary on-site sales office. It’s a work of architecture in its own right, one that expresses a sense of place for prospective buyers. Rich in tactility, views and connection to landscape, the materiality features striking black timber punctuated with copper cladding. 

Set within Moss Vale General Cemetery amidst the NSW Southern Highlands, the design for this public amenities block focuses on a gentle provision of shelter. Its strong, elegant and robust brick materiality affords protection from the predominant winds that blow across the plain, while the circular form allows the building to nestle into the landscape without any rigid sense of front or back.

Small but impactful design interventions, based on transformational new connections to the outdoors and natural light, have transformed this 70-year-old house into a contemporary home for a young family. Level changes allow the new addition to connect directly with a thoughtfully designed courtyard where sunlight reaches well into the afternoon – even in winter. A concrete bench extending the full length of the living space truly connects inside and outside, while recycled brick and plywood joinery complete the honest, cost-effective material palette.

Evoking a sense of playful sophistication, innovative design interventions create a new home for the Australian Design Centre while dealing intelligently with the site’s visual exposure to traffic. Flexibility is a critical focus for the galleries, whose compartmentalisation also left something of a ‘dead’ space in between. The inventive, playful and hard-working solution is a low, sloping terrace that also functions as a seating area, elegantly resolving the differences in level and linking the two spaces.

Form and function, beauty and utility, surface and shelter, building and landscape – these tensions all dissolve in the design of a series of amenities buildings for sports fields in Western Sydney. With a tactile ground surface of crushed granite, the main structures are cylindrical forms which allow for fluid movement in, around and between the fields and road. A large, sculptural fly roof completes the striking geometry, creating shelter for spectators and capturing rainwater for reuse.

Celebrating the distinctive beauty of its raw concrete shell, the intervention in this small café is strictly contained to a vertical limit in order to establish a strong legibility between existing and new features. A finely detailed tiled surface is used to craft this juxtaposition, with the entirety of programmatic elements kept within its sleek black boundary for a striking yet simple architectural intervention.