Warrandyte House draws heavily on the Australian landscape and agricultural building typologies. Can you talk us through the initial concepts for the project and how your ideas came together?

I grew up in a farming region of Gippsland and was always more fascinated by the scatterings of rudimentary agricultural structures than the main farm house. The rickety hayshed with its slender poles, the bunker-like milking shed with its concrete blockwork and galvanised steel railing, and the machinery shed with its sharp skillon roof and blank metal siding. These were an architecture not of borrowed colonial styles, but of pure function and utility.

The concept for the formal arrangement of the Warrandyte House emerged from these rudimentary typologies. It has been conceived as a mostly rectangular plan, anchored into the prominent ridgle-line of a steeply sloping property. The main form is defined by a singular skillon roof that falls with the slope of the land. Internally, this acts to funnel views through living spaces, out across the unfolding open woodland landscape and distant Yarra Valley beyond. Externally, the simple agricultural form sits comfortably with a group of nearby farmsheds.

The material palette — particularly the earthy browns and dark tones, allows the house to sit comfortably within its environmental setting. How do you approach selecting materials for a project, and what guided your decisions for Warrandyte House?

It was important that the materials complimented the existing landscape. In a more urban context, we might look at the streetscape and surrounding buildings for direction in our palette but in this setting it was about the colour of the earth, the trunks of the box gums, the shades of greens, browns and blacks seen in the surrounding landscape.

Given that we were burying the building slightly into the ground, it made sense to use a base of brick to help anchor the form into the ridgeline. We used the grey/brown toned Megalong Valley dry-pressed clay bricks which seem to perfectly blend with palette of the surrounding open woodland landscape. The bricks create a lower datum and tonally combine with timber windows and sliding battened sun screens. The upper section of the building is wrapped in a matte graphite ribbed metal cladding, a reference to agricultural buildings, but also allowing the form to become recessive, highlighting the contrasting pale green-grey leaves of adjacent gums. We also discovered that it provides a beautiful, non-reflective canvas for the late afternoon tree shadows.

How do the transitions created between interior spaces, terraces and the landscape surrounding the house contribute to the overall experience of the home?

The levels and siting of the building was a critical aspect of the design process. From the high ridge- line entry at the west down to the site of the lower-level existing pool (to be retained) to the east there was a level drop of over 2 metres. We needed the building to be able to transition this height so that the occupants could step outside and connect directly with the pool and lower garden. This was achieved through a series of gentle landscaped steps at the entry, dividing the house into 3 stepped zones (sleeping, service core and living) and then terracing down through stepped external entertaining areas. The gentle terracing from entry to lower garden has ensured that the occupants have a much greater connection to the landscape and are more likely to go outside and engage with these spaces.

How does working within the Australian landscape shape your approach to architecture, particularly in the way you respond to site, climate and different context across your projects?

By adding a building to a site you are inherently changing it, and potentially even degrading that site forever. With this in mind we try to design out of respect for what is already there, particularly the sensory reactions a site might evoke and the physical and environmental attributes that make it unique. For us this means using cues from the landscape to design something that simply makes sense in that specific location. In terms of a climatic response, we design specifically to a Victorian climate which can be hot in summer but relatively cool for at least 6 months of the year. We work hard to ensure good orientation, insulated windows, built-in eaves to the north, operable external sun screens to the east and west and good ventilation. More recently, we have been pushing to further improve building energy performance by focussing on improved insulation and air tightness, whilst still allowing any internal vapour to be efficiently expelled. Our aim is that our houses can be lived in comfortably with very little need for heating and cooling.

What aspects of the design and build process tend to excite you most as a studio, and what do you feel sets Figureground’s projects apart?

Architecture has an often-misguided reputation for being all about aesthetics and style, but it is largely about problem solving. In today's unsustainable ‘disposable’ culture, our practice remains acutely aware of how permanent a building is. Trends will come and go but it is the fundamental design response to any given brief that will ensure the project has some real longevity, and in that sense, is more sustainable. What continues to excite us is just how different every site is and the different challenges that come with them. We try not to have preconceived ideas but let ideas develop fluidly in response to each site's (and each client’s) unique problems that need to be solved.

One aspect I particularly love to engage with is the landscape. I was trained as a landscape architect prior to coming to architecture so I can’t help but constantly look at ways for the building occupants to enjoy and better engage with the outside environment, whether it is natural or designed. We have just completed an interesting new residential project in East Brunswick where every room in the house has a direct connection to a garden and each of the gardens have a different purpose – the result is a home that feels restorative and is a real delight to inhabit!