Babylon | Fiona Spence | 2025 | 澳大利亚
Starting with a uniquely whimsical canvas, Fiona Spence sought to preserve the magic of her Northern Beaches home while layering it with her own playful design aesthetic.
Fiona Spence is a true doyenne of the design industry – she helmed interiors mecca Spence & Lyda for 25 years and co-founded textile company Innate Collection. Through her immersive career, Spence has developed an eye for artful form and a passion for design that pushes boundaries. Babylon, the home she shares with her husband, Morris Lyda, ticks all the above boxes. Built in the 1950s to a design by Edwin Kingsbury and renovated by Spence in collaboration with architect Rob Brown of Casey Brown Architecture, the residence is objectively groundbreaking – it was the 2025 winner of the Australian Institute of Architects John Verge Award for Interior Architecture. But most significantly, Spence says, “the interior is an intensely personal statement, an intentionally personal revelation.”
Formerly known by the residents of its Northern Beaches locale as ‘The Castle’, Babylon perches atop a ridge overlooking Pittwater, with Hawkesbury sandstone walls that soar to a towering seven metres in places and give the structure the air of an ancient citadel, inside and out. Built on the eve of the swinging 1960s, the original home rewarded guests who could brave the 100-odd steps up to the building with entry to a bohemian enclave, where the liveliness of endless music and parties stood in contrast to the tranquillity of the site – the raw beauty of ocean, bush and rocky cliff.Whimsy is built into every curve of the building – there are no right angles here – along with an intrinsic reverence for the natural beauty of the site, combining to create a singular structure that is, in an understated word, special. It’s an intangible thing, says Spence, “but it’s something that you can absolutely feel when you stand in a space; there is something held within the edifice. I call it magic.”
This magic seduced the couple to accept the home’s issues – most dramatically, the walls needed shoring to halt their slow-motion slide down the hill. A larger renovation was also required to bring the home into the modern age: primarily, a more functional kitchen, a new bathroom – so guests wouldn’t have to wander a labyrinth of passages to find the loo – and better flow between the indoors and out. Working with Brown, Spence sought to refine the home’s design, solving challenges posed by the tricky site with a wing that dances around the delicate angophora trees and captures the home’s original whimsy. It is essentially speaking the same design language but in a slightly different dialect, she says.In the process, Spence discovered the joys and perils of an interior designer working on their own home. “The problem with designing for yourself is it’s very hard to give yourself parameters, and so one’s mind leaps off into 75 different versions,” she says, adding that elements of the design shifted and changed right up to the last second. While ample time is the enemy of decisiveness, it also gave them incredible opportunities, both to fine-tune their decisions and to work collaboratively with gifted artisans, who helped to continue the home’s fancifulness with one-of-a-kind designs. As an example, Spence tells of their stonemason, hired to restore and repoint the sandstone walls, who subsequently revealed incredible creative gifts and masterminded, among other things, the tessellated patio with its patchwork of marble, sandstone, red clay bricks and salvaged hardwood.
Restoring and modernising this unique building required a light touch, but Spence’s extensive experience was almost a drawback. “With Rob and I, our first inclination was to impose our will upon it, because of our collective experience,” she reflects. “Morris rightly said, ‘You have to be really careful. There’s magic here, and it’s fragile.’ That was a big thing for all of us – not to stuff up that magic but to recognise it and nurture it. In the end, Morris was always listening to the house, and Rob and I needed to listen, too.”The essence of Babylon is a striking sense of theatricality – perhaps explaining why Lyda – whose career is producing large-scale, high-impact concert tours – was so quick to recognise and champion it. The home was built for entertainment and, in its early days, was famous for the parties that were held there. The great room still evokes echoes of those bohemian bashes, with the renovation preserving fanciful features like the sprung floor for dancing and the stage, which is disguised as a daybed now but could be called back into active service at a moment’s notice.
The whole house is, in many ways, a stage set to surprise and delight. Lyda’s connections were mined to create fabulous feats of engineering, from the practical – a cable car to transport people and materials up the cliff, and a flying fox for the reverse journey – to the wonderfully unexpected, including a guillotine window in the kitchen and an entire wall that pivots horizontally to allow access to the home’s east wing. “There was no wall there, which was quite unworkable. We had to close it off in some way, while still honouring the original. So in summer or when entertaining, the wall effectively disappears and just becomes an interesting cantilevered element,” explains Spence. “Babylon is actually a theme park,” she adds with a laugh.Veneration of the site was always of paramount importance. The original home embodies a contradictory sense of grandeur along with a deep respect for the natural environment, so much so that the built form in places blends seamlessly into the bedrock. Spence and Brown sought to preserve this subservience to the powerful location, taking the concept further by inviting the solid bedrock of the site inside the boundaries of the build. The stone story began in the powder room, where the window is divided by a solid piece of rock. “That rock was one of our first touchstones as we started to design the new build.”
She explains that once they started excavating, they found they had unearthed a rock spur, the point of an entire plateau of sandstone. “We thought, ‘Well, if we have all this, why don’t we incorporate more of it into the house?’ So we embraced the rock and kind of made it our story.” Thus, the house is built around the sandstone boulders, which appear to be encroaching on it, like a slow-motion invasion by nature.Inventive use of stone is a repeated theme throughout, with this characteristically unyielding material put to surprisingly fluid and playful use – in the sandstone boulders, of course, but also in the Palladiana floors in the bathrooms and kitchen. One of Spence’s favourite features, the floors are a traditional Italian surface that she experimented with herself, breaking slabs of marble on site and painstakingly rearranging them until she was happy with the spacing. Terrazzo was poured in between, then the surface polished to a shine. The result displays the living beauty of stone, with its irregular shapes and light-capturing crystals.
The ever-changing interplay of light is an obsession Spence freely admits, and by both accident and careful design, Babylon is constructed to maximise the playfulness of light and shadow, sparkles and prisms. Panels of coloured glass that had to be removed from the original structure were cut down and put into louvres, which cast a warm amber glow. This idea was taken further in the louvres for the new wing, which feature dichroic filters – an idea taken from Lyda’s use of the technology in stage performances – to refract the light into multiple hues. “When the west-setting sun hits these louvres, it creates a symphony of colours,” says Spence.Nature, of course, is the peerless performer. Spence tells of the sun rising over the water, viewed from the primary bedroom through a lacework of angophoras. “That bedroom is an absolute revelation to exist in. I watch this symphony of light play out every day as the world wakes up. It’s an incredible joy.”
Architecture by Casey Brown Architecture. Original architecture by Edwin Kingsbury.
Interior design by Fiona Spence. Build by David Campbell Building.
- 项目文案：Shelley Tustin
- 项目摄影：Derek Swalwell
- 转载自：The Local Project
- 图片@The Local Project
- 语言：英语
- 编辑：序赞网
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