in amusing fashion). I prefer our house this
way. The photographs accompanying this
article show it as a finished building one
year after completion, but as an unfinished
work of living architecture. It’s still being
made through the patterns of daily life. I
love and require these rhythms. Accordingly,
the house will continue to be “made” until
we eventually leave. Then it will be someone
else’s to bring into a fuller state
of completion.
This house arose from an inkling that
interiors were of greater consequence than
exteriors. Clearly both matter, but they
are directed by fundamentally different
conditions, and because we were on a tight
budget with modest incomes we bought a04
fifteeen-by-fifteen-metre plot of land, put
a small 105-square-metre house on it and
poured the majority of our effort into its
interior as the place we would spend most
of our time under the bleaching white
light of the Perthian sun. Because of the
block’s dimensions it’s impossible to get an
expansive sense of the house’s exterior, so
we kept this extremely direct and economic.
While living in London, and after multiple
return trips, we paid many visits to Sir
John Soane’s masterpiece at Lincoln’s Inn
Fields – his own house, or more precisely
his “house museum” – a project that took
forty years to complete as it was made,
re-made and expanded. The density of this
compressed inner world is truly wondrous.04 The house’s exterior and
landscape is bathed in
the light of the Western
Australian sun.05 Clean lines and a minimal
approach to decoration
characterize the
designers’ approach.06 Each room is a
different interplay of
light and dark, textures
and colours.