Projects

View and learn more about the design of houses and other residential projects, including apartments, luxury houses, beachfront houses, waterfront houses, share houses, duplexes, country houses, holiday houses, eco-houses, stand-alone houses, studio apartments, residential developments, and residential estates; for case studies, precedent studies, and inspiration.

Featuring the work of renown architects Sean Godsell Architects, Tony Owen Architects, Sam Crawford Architects, Architects EAT, John Henry Architects, Steen Architects, Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects, Shuhei Endo, Kengo Kuma, Tezuka Architects, Akira Sakamoto, Arkhefield Architects, Ian Moore Architects, Paul Morgan, Robert Simeoni Architects, Andrew Maynard Architects, Haskell Architects, Stutchbury + Pape Architects, Stanisic Architects, Candelapas Associates, The TVS Partnership, Energy Architecture, Saunders Architects, Williams Boag Architects, Kevin Hayes Architects, and Kinsley + Associates, among many others.

Air Apartments

Ian Moore Architects
Broadbeach, QLD

With 134 apartments, a gymnasium and health club, landscaped gardens, pools and a tennis court, Air is the epitome of resort-style Gold Coast living, wearing a sophisticated designer façade. Due to the characteristic topography of the area – the tower is wedged into that narrow strip of development with ocean and beach on one side, mined sand dunes, the Nerang River, canals, floodplains and hinterland on the other.

Architectural Iconoclasts - Virtual Reality

Asymptote Architecture's latest projects - the Penang Global City Centre in Malaysia, the World Business Centre Busan in South Korea, and a luxury residential tower in the United Arab Emirates - are different to their past virtual work. These projects will be built, constructed from real materials in the real world.

Balaam Residence

Arkhefield, Brisbane

Brisbane practice Arkhefield has grown rapidly in the ongoing into a confident, mid-sized firm of 40. Founded on a genuinely process-based, discursive form of architecture that actively works with the client, Arkhefield don’t come armed with a strong house style to impose on projects. What they do bring is general principles – on engagement with the environment and with the region.

Ballandean House

Arkhefield
Queensland

Ballandean House is the principal homestead and guesthouse facility of the Tobin Winery, facing north on a gently sloping block in the heart of Queensland’s Granite Belt. It is at times a harsh landscape: scorching in the summertime, and otherwise only home to remnant native bushland and scrub, perfectly adapted over eons to fluctuations in the Australian climate.

Bangalay

Stutchbury + Pape Architects
Upper Kangaroo Valley, NSW


At the site of Stutchbury + Pape’s ‘Bangalay’, on 43 acres of former Buderoo National Parkland in the NSW Upper Kangaroo Valley, the moonrise and sunrise chase each other through a single opening in the dense eucalypt trees, watched eagerly from the house’s panoramic windows and mirrored in its feature dam.

Bondi Wave House

Tony Owen Architects
Bondi, NSW

Like a breathe of fresh sea-salty air, the Wave House invites the ocean in. Indeed, the line of the wave is the unifying element which runs all the way through the house. The experience of space is intensified through architectural slippage. Like diving headlong though an early morning breaker, one space slides into another – inside integrating outside.

Bundeena Beach House

Sam Crawford Architects
Bundeena, NSW

Australians share a cultural memory of summers spent beachside, in an ambiguous space between indoors and outdoors. In this great Australian myth, sand brings the beach inside while meals and showers are taken in backyards, parks and beaches, inverting the interior/exterior distinction in a quasi-mystical communion with the environment.

Cape Schanck House

Paul Morgan Architects
Cape Schanck, Melbourne


Approached through a natural corridor of tea trees, the exterior of the Cape Schanck House is an interplay of glass, stark white and deep brown. The colours and materials seem to point in two directions at once, referencing the clean, pared-back aesthetics of modernism and the back-to-basics images of environmental and rural design

Cities Within Cities

How to urbanise, industrialise and modernise

As the world lauds Shanghai as a model of exciting urbanism, University of Leeds’ Professor Justin O’Connor has noticed something disturbing. “What,” he asks, “is exciting other than a vicarious reliving of the West’s own innocently brutal days of early industrialisation and modernisation?” Somewhere between dystopic science fiction and this innocently brutal past, Chinese cities hold the West’s gaze with their images of booming growth, teeming masses and environmental apocalypse. But the fact is that nineteenth-century London translates poorly into twenty-first century eco-anxiety and is unimaginable on China’s staggering scale. This is China’s great problem: how to urbanise, industrialise and modernise when the Western model – the only one seriously available – seems to imply Armageddon?

DOS Architects On The Way Up

DOS Architects is the style behind the stars - from the recording studio to the ultimate luxury resort, and the funky hip hop set design. Their flair takes centre stage all over the world, putting the swing into bus shelters, the sweetness into a day at work, and the sparkle into a concrete jungle.

Eaglemont House

Kennedy Nolan Architects, Victoria

All demure federation brick cottage up front, Kennedy Nolan’s Eaglemont House is all unexpected grandeur and soaring sensuous curves from behind. It’s a combination something akin to a highpowered Bentley streetcar, or an extremely well-cut Armani suit: the rear extension billows out unexpectedly like a swathe of black satin, an effect at the same time subtly monumental and coolly impressive, emanating quiet charm from the front, and refined luxury upon closer inspection.

Essex Street House

Andrew Maynard Architects
Brunswick, Melbourne


On a typical street in inner suburban Melbourne, a double-fronted weatherboard house hides a secret in its backyard: the extension that is Andrew Maynard’s Essex Street House. The deeper-than-average block is typical of the 1890s settlement of the area, when utilitarian workers cottages boasted - for practicality - large backyards for access to a rear laneway.

Eyelid House

Fiona Winzar Architects; South Yarra, Melbourne

In the inner city suburb of South Yarra, an earthy, solid looking Victorian terrace house features an extension that is at once bold and humble, forwardlooking and rustic. The salient feature of the extension, the Colorbond-clad ‘eyelid’, isn’t merely an appropriation of the pitched corrugated iron roofs of neighbouring heritage houses, but a testament to the architect’s interest in synthesizing randomness and order to craft a space that is natural and familiar.

Heij House

Energy Architecture
Aldinga Arts Eco Villages, Adelaide


Along the southern road out of Adelaide is a string of coastal towns and newer, rapidly expanding subdivisions. This is Adelaide’s sprawl, and it reached the quiet fishing and resort town of Aldinga Beach in a big way in 2003, with a proposal for a 700-block subdivision beside the Aldinga Scrub Conservation Park. The deal, which would have increased the town’s population by a third, was seemingly stitched up between council, the developer, and the state government before the public could comment on it.

Inkerman Oasis Housing Development

Williams Boag Architects
Port Phillips, Victoria

The design of Oasis Stage 1 by Williams Boag suffered a web more tangled than usual. Yet the development, a brownfields transformation in central St Kilda, has managed to survive with its original values intact

Left Field

The world press gave a collective shrug when Paulo Mendes da Rocha, resident of São Paulo, was this year awarded architecture's highest honour, architecture's Nobel.

Light As Air: Emerging Architects of Japan

Shuhei Endo, Kengo Kuma, Tezuka Architect, Yoshio Tanaguchi, Akira Sakamoto

Japan has one of the world's most admired architectural traditions, one that has influenced artists and architects worldwide from the mid-19th century onwards. Presented here are some of the best of a new generation of Japanese architects, intent on making "something new of tradition".

Lorne House

Steen Architects
Surf Coast, Victoria


Melbourne architect Ethan Steen has barely begun his career, but he’s already been blooded on residential work, a small gallery, some retail and commercial design, and a neat line in experimental furniture. It may well be the Lorne House, however, that launches him on his way. Perhaps the cleanest, strongest expression of his style to date, the seaside house is evidence of what happens when young architect meets demanding bureaucracy.

North Adelaide Residence

Bruce Harry & Associates

Adelaide lives in our collective conscience as a place of churches, tramlines and the seaside, and while it is most famously known as the City of Churches, it is perhaps more aptly associated with the charming Colonial and Federation sandstone architecture which gives the city its quintessentially Australian aesthetic.

Park Street Project

Robert Simeoni Architects
Melbourne


Robert Simeoni’s Park Street House is proof of the adage that the best things come in small packages. At one room wide and three storeys high, the Park Street House was the smallest and least expensive entrant in this year’s RAIA Victoria Awards Residential (Houses) category, yet it still knocked out its larger, more aspirational rivals to take out the overall winner’s position.

Pindari

Candalepas Associates
Randwick, Sydney


Apartment living is one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century. In an era marked by growing populations, diminishing space and mounting environmental anxiety, apartments are increasingly becoming an urban planning necessity. But in a country where home ownership remains the dream and a house is still the mark of success and stability, it is a necessity that we hesitate to embrace.

St Andrew’s Beach House

Sean Godsell
Mornington, Victoria


Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula relishes its atmosphere of lazy beachside decadence. Its shores in a single sweep rush breathtakingly to high, jagged cliffs; and mansions, lively local markets, grand historic gardens, and galleries spilling art and antique grace the seaside village with technicolour culture.

Sybarite Architects

Dream on! is all that you can really say to the architects at Sybarite, and it's really because you want to know what they'll dream up next.

Tasmanian Beach House

Haskell Architects
Bay of Fires, Tasmania


In a country that thinks of its beaches in images of palm trees, golden sand and deep suntans, Tasmania seems an unlikely location for a beach house. Better known for old-growth forests and a chilly climate, the island state’s coast reveals its own kind of beauty, rugged and exposed. Stripped of the shining gold of its tropical counterparts, the fine white sand of Tasmanian beaches seems to retain a rawness that links it to the rocks from whence it came.

Viret at Clayfield

The TVS Partnership
Clayfield, Brisbane


The Brisbane climate is a luxury that many dream of, as is the beautiful subtropical environment. It is fitting, then, that the Viret project took the form of an Eco Apartment Development, so that its residents could best enjoy the features of the area, with a sound mind as to the environmental impact of their home and lifestyle.

Windsor Loft

Architects EAT
Prahran, Victoria


Warehouse conversions might be the architectural form of this trendy recycling of history, a dynamic exchange between the fashions and needs of various eras. In this genre of return and reuse, Architects EAT gives us the Windsor Loft. A former neon sign manufacturing and press printing workshop, it assumes a new life as a trendy home and office in central Prahran.

Wings, Eyes, Trees

People now talk of Santiago Calatrava buildings as they do of cathedrals. In presenting their 2005 Gold Medal to Calatrava, the American Institute of Architects described a "soaring structural poetry" that "elevates the human spirit". The process of sanctification was swift. It originated in America around 2004, after Calatrava revealed his design for the new $2 billion ground zero transportation hub.

Zone Apartments

Stanisic Associates
Wolli Creek, NSW


Zone is sound evidence that compact living can be achieved without compromising environmental sensitivity: its situation in the urban renewal area of Wolli Creek - bordering on the mangroves of the Cooks River - is perfect proof of this.

Zulaikha Laurence Residence

Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects
Balmain, Sydney


A great deal of pleasure can be found in a lid that closes perfectly over the lip of its box. Even more, if the box nests squarely within another, or has a miniature drawer, or a secret compartment hidden by an imperceptible false panel. A well made box seems to combine preindustrial handicraft with the intricate accuracy of the age of clocks and machines.
 

Frank Gehry | Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners | Foster+Partners | Steven Holl and Arup | Pascal Arquitectos | Architectus' Gallery of Modern Art, QLD
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