Yakimono: Russell & George
A layered sensory experience, Russell & George’s Yakimono draws on the experience of a typical late-night Izakaya to plate-up a restaurant that is reminiscent of Japanese concepts, without the stuffiness of tradition.
Valparaiso + architect Cazu Zegers
Composed of forty-four hills and a flat area oriented to the bay, the busy and sometimes worn-down working port of Valparaiso, Chile, is a natural amphitheatre with an urban fabric that clings to steep cliffs and dramatic hills.
Darebin Intercultural Centre: Sibling Architecture
By prioritising community as the driving force behind their design, Sibling Architecture’s Darebin Intercultural Centre stands as a welcoming new community facility, aspiring to nurture meaningful interracial, intercultural and interfaith relationships between the people who live, work and play in the City of Darebin.
Guangzhou + architect Atelier Deshaus
Guangzhou, my hometown and where my grandparents live, is the capital and largest city of Guangdong province in southern China. It is a bustling city with commercial developments yet filled with hidden gems that retain a traditional heartland.
Garden House: BKK Architects
Garden House is an enduring home which successfully creates a spatial model that is specific to the couple occupying it (and their two cats). It ensures long-term liveability while embracing robust materials and smart gestures to work with the existing site features.
Deco House: Mihaly Slocombe
Preserving the historic fabric of the original Art Deco building, Mihaly Slocombe have created a home filled with light. Providing room for a family to grow.
Nightingale Anstey: Breathe
Homes are complex places, and we expect a lot from them. It’s easy to forget the range of functions that they are often required to accommodate – sleeping, relaxation, meal prep and food storage, cooking, making art, home office, social roles… the list goes on. In smaller homes often these activities occur in only a few rooms, which can make things very tricky to manage and good design becomes very important.
Creating an underwater garden
City skylines increasingly feature roofs and walls that are covered in foliage to trap stormwater and moderate internal climates. This approach to greening is now creeping below the waterline as ecologists and designers come together to co-create living seawalls.
Autumn House: Studio Bright
The gardens of Autumn House are not only instrumental in gifting the clients the tranquil home they desired, but also act as an offering of urban generosity to the laneway and street. Described as two restorations and an addition, Autumn House integrates new and existing heritage elements within the addition, creating a home that “engenders the cohesion of spirit that a new house should have”.
Skin deep
I was making a left turn onto Lygon Street, towards East Brunswick, when my passenger, one of three founders of our Stockholm-based architecture practice, began to gesticulate wildly at a row of silver, waveshaped fins attached to the facade of a five-storey apartment building, exclaiming in surprise, “What is that?!” Our office does a lot of housing research, which often requires constructing big data sets and large archives of architectural drawings in order to analyse trends.
