Terracotta House | Lande Architects | 2025 | 澳大利亚
An Edwardian house in Melbourne is transformed by Lande Architects into a warm, enduring family home through spatial clarity, crafted detail and a richly layered material palette.On a Malvern street in Melbourne’s inner south-east, Terracotta House by Lande Architects sits quietly, imbued with warmth and memory rather than grandeur. Clad in terracotta shingles, the residence feels grounded – soft, lived-in and timeless. “It’s a special one for us,” reflects Lande’s director, Lachlan McArdle. “I think it’s really the first project that we feel has captured our architecture and our interiors.”
The initial brief was surprisingly modest, with the clients simply asking for a mud room. But as conversations evolved, the true needs of the family – a couple with three children who had moved from Sydney – began to surface: better flow between living spaces, an office and a greater sense of connection to place. The result is an intuitive and deeply personal family home that feels, to the clients, like a place to establish new roots.The existing home – an Edwardian with a dated, early 2000s extension – posed spatial challenges. “You sort of have three programs in two spaces,” explains McArdle of the initial planning stages. “Essentially, the dining table is going to be sitting in what you perceive as the hallway, which isn’t going to really work.” The team proposed a bold but simple move: pushing out and creating a sunken dining room. “We fought tooth and nail to get it sunk,” he adds, citing council resistance due to flood overlays. However, the pay-off was worth it. “When you’re sitting in the living room and you look out towards the garden, the dining room disappears – you forget there’s a whole other room between you and outside.”
This sense of clarity flows throughout Terracotta House. A custom-built sideboard acts as a bookcase and dry bar, serving both the dining and living areas. It’s a hardworking piece that supports the family’s daily rhythms while also allowing them to personalise the space with what McArdle calls “little artefacts of life”. Steel doors stack neatly into walls, connecting the kitchen and garden area with a zero-threshold transition. “It really lets inside and outside be much more continuous and flowy.”Both the clients’ upbringings subtly guide material choices in meaningful ways. “They grew up in farming communities,” explains McArdle, “so we wanted to bring those memories of home and growing up in rural New South Wales into the house.” That sentiment is etched into the centrepiece of Terracotta House: the kitchen island. “At the first meeting we had, that island was designed before we knew where it was going,” says McArdle, laughing. “It was really meant to represent a farmhouse kitchen table but it morphed into an island bench. It’s probably the most instilled aspect of the house – the heart of the home.”
The theme of familiarity reinterpreted is what gives the residence its emotional charge. “There’s nostalgia built into the home somehow. It’s familiar, but you’re intrigued to zoom in or explore a little more.” The interiors balance reclaimed, custom and existing pieces to feel evolved rather than designed in a single moment. “We hope that you can’t really tell where we started and stopped; it could be old or it could be new. Good architecture should speak to its time. You shouldn’t try and mimic the past, and I don’t think you should try and predict the future. A home should feel and present its time.”The use of terracotta is similarly thoughtful. “The roof of the old part of the house is the water-worn terracotta. We love quiet architecture … it’s so easy to miss that it feels like it could have been there for a year or 20 years or 100 years.” The newer SK1N terracotta shingles from Brickworks on the rear extension nod to that history while responding to a neighbourhood full of terracotta rooftops. McArdle describes this as “different dialects of the same language”. Cut onsite, the shingles required a custom jig to achieve their crisp detailing. “The precision and the artisanal craftsmanship that went into executing that was incredible.”
Inside and out, durability and longevity underpin the overall design. “It’s quite a low-maintenance house. That terracotta, we hope, will take on a nice patina and settle in even more into its context.” Energy-wise, the dwelling leans into the future, with a solar PV system, all-electric appliances and an electric vehicle charger.The reimagining of the family home extends outdoors, too. A previously oversized, underused pool was replaced by a smaller plunge pool and generous lawn, framed by new landscaping by Ben Scott Garden Design. “The backyard, now, is to sit in and enjoy.” Still, there’s a deliberate resistance to overly contemporary slickness. “We are clinging onto elements of the previous two centuries. There’s something about this era of houses and that tactility – people walk in and just really feel at peace.”
Terracotta House will also accommodate the family over the coming years. “There are two boys and a girl, who has her own powder room in her bedroom.” Upstairs, a previously redundant living space was enclosed to create another bedroom, ensuring all three children had rooms of their own – an arrangement that balances present needs with future flexibility.Perhaps the most touching transformation was less about form and more about feeling. “When we met with the clients, it still didn’t feel like they were in it for keeps,” says McArdle. “But now they say, ‘We love our neighbours, love the area, love the schools … we’ve finally got the house that feels like home.’” It’s this intersection of architecture and empathy that defines Terracotta House. The home wouldn’t exist in the same way with any other family or on any other site; it’s a design that could only have emerged from this exact pairing. “It was the clients’ very unique tapestry of history mixed with the unique context of this house that yielded this response.”
- 项目文案：Sarah Webb
- 项目摄影：Anson Smart
- 转载自：The Local Project
- 图片@The Local Project
- 语言：英语
- 编辑：序赞网
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