Inside an Architect-Designed Dream Home Wrapped in Terracotta (House Tour)

Home for this project is multi-layered. It's a home away from home for the mum and dad but it's somewhere where the kids have grown up and will always remember. So it's a really important role that we take on to help deliver a new home for people. It's not lost on us the trust that our clients put into us to deliver their family home and what that means for them but also putting a stake in the ground that cemented their place amongst the immediate and broader community that they've established. But it's also a great example of how as a practice of architects and interior designers we can deliver a response rich in empathy in a really cohesive way. I'm Lachlan McArdle, Director at Lander Architects and this is our terracotta house. Looking into that sort of regional, rural, agricultural upbringing we could sort of see that in a lot of their artwork, furniture selections and it really informed the material palette that we worked with in the project. So those sort of Australian tones of reds and browns and rusts really form the basis of our design palette as we were working through the early design stages. It led to some pretty obvious and inherent material selections you know from timbers to terracottas to natural stones which we felt really reflected where they came from. Some of the regional aspects and flavours which we look to integrate like the ironbark veneer and solid ironbark legs on the armour bench were really exciting to work with. And then even down to the landscape elements we replaced a larger family pool with a more modest plunge pool and it really referenced one of the artworks that they had was a picture of someone diving into one of the agricultural water troughs which we thought was a really nice connection. In one of the first design meetings we sort of really wanted to focus on the kitchen as the heart of the home and that sort of farmhouse style kitchen table morphing into an island bench really where sort of everyone gathers, talks about their day, serves food. You know the homework table when needed, the boardroom if required. It was really an integral part to the design and one of the first things that we knew we were working with. The clients came to us with a pretty simple request to add a mudroom or side entry for the kids when they came home from school and that would really help them sort of centralise that kid associated clutter and mess and chaos. Once we started to work with the clients we sort of realised that the existing structure and the existing layout had a few shortcomings. There's sort of a squashed kitchen and dining room but then also like a very generous and probably vast living room. So once we sort of started to talk to the clients we realised it was some pretty minor alterations or additions were able to really remedy some of those shortcomings in the house's design. The actual new build was limited to the new dining room and the mud entries gallery. We found that the existing house was almost doing everything that the family needed. With a couple of kids sharing one room and a third living room almost going unwasted there was an obvious opportunity to close that in and provide each kid with their own bedroom. That was something that we did upstairs as well as taking off the old trusses and installing a new flat roof which extended the ceiling height. On the ground floor all the spaces were there but we just felt that they were sort of disproportionately allocated. So by adding the new dining room we were able to spread the living room and the kitchen out which gives each space now its own cohesive feeling. The sunken dining room really brings a level of intimacy to the space. By sinking the dining it really feels like you're dining in the garden and it touches on that very Australian way of or it brings the outdoors inside in those nice family moments. Keeping the footprint of the dining room modest was a real challenge. We knew we had to find a bespoke dining table to fit the space. We tried rectangular and round and we really needed something in between. We reached out to Nick from Made by Morgan and he was great at helping us come up with a tabletop shape and then also assembling various options for the legs. We find that now it's very comfortable for a family of five or if there's a few guests as an eight or a ten seater but it's equally as intimate just for mum and dad to have a late supper after the kids go to bed. Looking at what we inherited here in the Edwardian house we love the Marseilles terracotta roof tiles on the front sort of prominent in the area and left to sort of grow moss and border stains that patina showed real character and something we were keen to sort of amplify. We looked at the terracotta roof at the front for inspiration and the skins terracotta shingles were a really obvious choice for us to work with. The natural modelling of the terracotta really blends in with the roof from the front and it's a house that you might walk past a few times before realising what we'd actually done which we're excited by. I think given the north-facing back of the property here and how we've arranged the three primary spaces being the kitchen dining and living they all have a very unique attachment and connection to outside and the garden and following that light it really changes the feeling of each space hour by hour and it's an incredibly dynamic volume to occupy.