Artist Teresa Canal laughs that she and her engineer husband are very impulsive people. But the building project they have just finished in Freemans Bay with architect Tim Dorrington, is anything but. Minutely considered from its disciplined palette of materials (concrete both rough and smooth, steel, cedar, strandboard) to the sitting of the house on the land, the placement of windows, even the selection of door furniture, this is a house that suggests of hours of careful thought.
"My husband engineered the site with a massive retaining wall - it took two months to source the right clay and countless truckloads to level the site. Then he handed it over to me to run the building project," says Teresa. No pressure, then.
The brief to Dorrington would have been a joy for any architect: the couple specified a house that was not enormous, but was well-designed. They are very social, so needed a space that could fit people, dogs, loads of kids ... a good house for a party. The focus of the brief was functional, nothing extraneous. Dorrington responded with a deceptively simple design - a double-height concrete rectangle, intersected at an angle by a cedar-clad box for the double garage.
But it is his detailing that makes the spaces exceptional. The mansard-style steel roof reflects the shapes of the surrounding villas. Upstairs, instead of vast expanses of glass everywhere, he poked in irregular square windows as a modern reference to odd attic windows of centuries past. A concrete bridge intersects and frames the vast living room ceiling.
