This house was designed to suit the lifestyle of a family with 4 daughters. It expresses the tension between privacy and openness through the alternating areas of glass and screening, and between the sensual and the rational through the use of curves and rectilinear forms.

The house is “split” by the void for circulation and staircase into front and back, and then brought together by the enfolding roof. The architectural devices used function on emotional, formal and climactic levels, such as the operable louvre screens allowing privacy, air and views to be controlled to a high degree of flexibility. Materials are treated as stretched surfaces of metal, glass and plaster that alternately enclose and reveal as they fold and overlap.

The interiors and landscape were designed together with the architecture. The interiors continue the stretched, weightless, folding and opening language of the architecture. The elliptical swimming pool raised from the rectilinear carpet of grass creates a shimmering focus to the garden, while accentuating the diagonal of the small site to create a feeling of space. Detailing throughout serves to blur the interior and exterior, such as pebbles and stepping stones used in the interior circulation and timber decks extending the interior timber floor outside to the lawn.