Skip to content
Search
Close this search box.
  • Join
  • Login
  • Join
  • Login
  • Membership
    • Renew
    • Join
    • Practice (A+)
    • Member rewards
  • Online store
  • Explore Architecture
    • Find an architect
    • Working with an architect
    • Education & Standards
    • Living Architecture
    • Reading Architecture
    • Pathways to architecture
    • Archi Ed
    • Hearing Architecture Podcast
    • Notable buildings
    • Venice Biennale
    • Open House Hobart
  • What’s On
    • Country Culture Community
    • FUTURE SHOCK: Designing City Resilience
    • Open House Hobart
    • Venice Biennale
    • All Events
  • Advocacy & News
    • Community Forum
    • Policy & Advocacy
    • Submission Library
    • Media Releases
    • News
    • NSW Design & Building Practitioners Act and Regulations
    • Sustainability and climate action
    • First Nations
    • Diversity & Equity
  • Awards, Prizes & Tours
    • 2023 National Architecture Awards Winners Gallery
    • Awards Program
    • Prizes
    • 2024 Dulux Study Tour
    • National and Chapter Architecture Awards Program
    • 2023 Gold Medal Tour
    • 2023 Smeg Tour
  • Preparing to register
  • CPD, Education & Resources
    • Overview
    • Wellbeing for architects
    • Purchase On Demand CPD
    • Face-to-Face CPD
    • Refuel CPD Courses
    • Practice Resources
    • National Mentoring Program
    • Showcase
    • Become a CPD Provider
  • Chapters
    • ACT
    • International
    • NSW
    • NT
    • QLD
    • SA
    • TAS
    • VIC
    • WA
  • EmAGN
    • About
    • Emerging Architect Prize
    • EmAGN Project Award
    • EmAGN Representatives
    • EmAGN Online Resources
    • Living Village Design Competition
  • SONA
    • Join
    • Beyond Uni
    • Advocacy
    • About
    • de-PICT
    • Member Benefits
    • Upscale
    • Super Studio 2023
    • Representatives
    • Representative Application
    • Study
    • Contact SONA
  • About Us
    • 2023 Annual General Elections – NOMINATIONS OPEN NOW
    • About the Institute
    • Board of Directors
    • National Council & Committees
    • Chapter Councils & Committees
    • Our Staff
    • Annual Reports
    • Work with Us
    • Contact Us
  • Partnerships
    • Corporate Partners
    • Supporting Partners
    • Partnership & Advertising Opportunities

Architect at Home: Nick Harding

  • 29 July 2021
Interview by Elizabeth Campbell
Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on email
Harry & Viv's House | HA Architecture | VIC | Photographer: Dan Hocking

What does the concept of home mean to you? 

A house is a place, home is an experience – knowing I can escape the world outside when I need a break; watching my kids Harry and Viv do their best to tear the place apart; sharing moments big and small with family and friends; building memories over time, through routine and tradition.

How would you describe your home?

Calm. This is the feeling we wanted to evoke, and it is the word that comes up again and again when people visit our home. It’s also ideal in its proximity to both nature and culture.

Architecturally, we wanted to test whether a 150-metre-square house with a 5 x 8-metre rear yard could become our spacious family home. On a relatively modest footprint, the key gesture was to borrow space from both the courtyard itself and the nearby Yarra River and Abbotsford Convent precinct. The coalescence of kitchen, dining and courtyard into one outdoor room defined the design process and, ultimately, lived experience in the home.

How do you choose items to fill your space with?

For the most part it has been a very organic process.

Right now, Harry and Vivi’s lives dominate. The front two rooms are theirs – one shared bedroom, one playroom – so ideally the worst of the chaos is in that section! But of course, their belongings spill down the hallway and beyond. 

I’m fortunate to have personal connections with some talented local photographers, and we have a growing collection of beautiful shots by friends including Dan Hocking, Kristoffer Paulsen and Kate Ballis. In a small inner-city home, a framed photo is like a window to the imagination.

Indoor plants help build the association with the natural environment and connect inside and out. A hanging planter above the kitchen island cements this as very much the heart of the home. Elsewhere, the living room shelves house our favourite books – as well as a few decorative objects from the Jam Factory in Adelaide, my hometown.

Harry & Viv's House | HA Architecture | VIC | Photographer: Dan Hocking

What role do materials play within your home?

Within a small home, robustness and tactility are very important to me.

Precise joinery was required to make the living, kitchen and dining area both functional and attractive. To help deliver the outdoor room effect, we used a deep green stain that echoed the tones of the native garden and existing olive trees.

Moving upstairs, heritage concerns ensured the main bedroom needed to be very contained. It’s an intimate loft and, to me, felt very much like a boat cabin — so we saturated the experience in natural timber to create an intimate sleeping compartment. 

Finally, the kitchen is celebrated with bold granite that is both functionally bulletproof and visually relaxing. The volcanic river stone aesthetic is not for everyone (we call it pastrami!) but, once we developed the custom colour for the joinery, it was a last-minute decision that brought everything together.

You talk a little bit about designing from the inside out, why do you think this is an important way of approaching a building, especially a home?

Too often people end up squeezing their lives into an architecturally designed box. Surely design should unfold organically around the experience, not the other way around?

In a home that is 4.8 metres wide there really is no choice: it is essential to design around ergonomics that make a space work. I tested many, many options to deliver our brief, and even then, we did compromise. In some ways there was not much architecture involved – just a second-storey extension with one west facing, 5-metre-wide facade. This project called for a very internal strategy where the exterior was driven by the interior planning. 

Design from the inside out also involves a considered approach to orientation, passive design, and outward views to nature.  The latter is especially important. My friend Fran Hale from Peachy Green helped us create a native garden space that is both as green as possible and functional for the kids. The side lightwell is a modest but important outlook, providing natural light and ventilation to the secondary rooms. 

At Ha_arc we believe bigger is not better. With creativity and precision, you can often resolve an outcome that delivers everything required in much less space than you imagine. This approach is increasingly important in an ever-growing city like Melbourne.

How do you approach sustainability within your own home?

We approach sustainability with a sense of urgency and ambition! It was exciting to see what we could achieve when designing our own home. We aimed for the maximum possible outcome, assuming that as owner occupiers we would be there for 20 years.

To us, maximum achievable sustainable design is assumed in every project – so we embedded it throughout the old and new house. Key features are east and west-facing external sun-shading; well-sealed, double-glazed windows and thorough insulation; concrete slab for thermal mass; hydronic heating with electric heat-pump; a 3.3-kilowatt solar array that consumes the entire north-facing roof; openable windows for natural ventilation, and ceiling fans. Across a small footprint of 150 metres-square, thermal comfort was achieved with no air-conditioning required.

What role do you think the home has within the wider context of the neighbourhood?

Hopefully it doesn’t stand out too much! The goal was to preserve the heritage character of the row, with the rear extension blending in as seamlessly as possible. In a modest way, I think our home demonstrates respectful contemporary design within strict heritage control – and also small footprint living that relies on adjacent community amenity.

 

Nick Harding is principal of Ha Architecture.

Elizabeth Campbell is a project architect at Kennedy Nolan with broad experience across single and multi-residential, cultural and commercial projects. She is a researcher, writer and contributing editor of Architect Victoria.

Published online:
29 Jul 2021

Source:
Architect Victoria
Edition 1
2022

Back to Reading Architecture

More from Architect Victoria

Yakimono: Russell & George

28 Nov 2023
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 ...
Read more

Valparaiso + architect Cazu Zegers

16 Oct 2023
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 ...
Read more

Darebin Intercultural Centre: Sibling Architecture

4 Sep 2023
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 ...
Read more

Guangzhou + architect Atelier Deshaus

27 Aug 2023
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 ...
Read more

Garden House: BKK Architects

14 Jul 2023
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 ...
Read more

Deco House: Mihaly Slocombe

22 May 2023
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 ...
Read more

Nightingale Anstey: Breathe

17 Apr 2023
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 ...
Read more

Creating an underwater garden

13 Feb 2023
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 ...
Read more

Autumn House: Studio Bright

2 Feb 2023
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 ...
Read more

Skin deep

19 Jan 2023
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 ...
Read more

Arthur: Oscar Sainsbury Architects

5 Dec 2022
A central deck is not only Oscar Sainsbury Architects' solution to the site’s flooding overlay, but a core part of their resulting design. Oscar’s aspirations ...
Read more

Apartment design guidelines as architecture

31 Oct 2022
In 2016, the Victorian government implemented the Better Apartment Design Standards (BADS) into the Victoria Planning Provisions (VPP) and all its planning schemes.
Read more

La Mama Theatre Rebuild: Meg White with Cottee Parker Architects

24 Oct 2022
Tasked with capturing the identity and idiosyncrasies of a meaningful cultural space, the La Mama Theatre Rebuild by Meg White with Cottee Parker Architects illustrates ...
Read more

Sharing cities with nature, by design 

27 Sep 2022
As an urban ecologist, I specialise in the science and practice of nature conservation in cities. This strikes most people as unusual. Surely, nature conservation ...
Read more

Balfe Park Lane: Kerstin Thompson Architects

14 Jul 2022
Considered across the scales of the neighbourhood, building and apartment, Kerstin Thompson Architects’ recently completed Balfe Park Lane is a demonstration of medium-density housing that ...
Read more

Re-valuing

8 Jun 2022
Through process and approaches that engage with multiple notions of heritage including problematic ones of environmental and cultural destruction, architecture can participate in the widening ...
Read more

Maggie Edmond: Edmond & Corrigan

7 Jun 2022
Edmond & Corrigan has employed an incomparable number of young architects who have gone on to have prolific careers with their own practices or as ...
Read more

A crucible for new housing typologies

12 May 2022
Faded photos of public housing projects from the early 1980s line the corridor walls of the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing, marking the time ...
Read more

Napier Street for Milieu: Freadman White

10 May 2022
Freadman White’s simultaneous development of Napier Street and Whitlam Place harnessed unique efficiencies and resulted in a highly efficient model for project delivery.
Read more

Amelia Borg, Kushagra Jhurani and Peter Elliott: How to get a job

3 Apr 2022
Early career professionals are often guided by a practice’s development guidelines. Many help by pairing graduates with an experienced graduate, registered architect, or even an ...
Read more
Instagram Youtube Linkedin-in Facebook-f Tiktok Pinterest
Chapters
  • ACT
  • International
  • NSW
  • NT
  • Queensland
  • SA
  • Tasmania
  • Victoria
  • WA
ARCHITECTURE.COM.AU
  • What’s On
  • Policy & Advocacy
  • Membership
  • Awards
  • CPD
  • About Us
  • SONA
The Institute
  • Join
  • Online Store
  • Member Portal
  • Partnership & Advertising Opportunities
  • Contact Us
  • Media Releases
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions

The Australian Institute of Architects acknowledges First Nations peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the lands, waters, and skies of the continent now called Australia.

We express our gratitude to their Elders and Knowledge Holders whose wisdom, actions and knowledge have kept culture alive.

We recognise First Nations peoples as the first architects and builders. We appreciate their continuing work on Country from pre-invasion times to contemporary First Nations architects, and respect their rights to continue to care for Country.

© Australian Institute of Architects

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish. Cookie settingsACCEPT
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are as essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
SAVE & ACCEPT

This form is now closed.