Symphonious—Perth Home Enabling Outdoor Living

Creating homes that both celebrate and temper the climate is a familiar challenge for Perth architects. In the hot, dry months of February and March, known as Bunuru in the Noongar calendar, the afternoon heat has an almost desert-like intensity, yet early mornings and balmy evenings are best spent outside, and winters are mild and brief. Homes need to withstand the heat, but the line between inside and out can be less defined than in colder climates, says architect Andrew Hagemann, whose recent project, the Filter House, allows its occupants to live in their garden as much as their home.

“We actually don’t reside in our buildings all that much here,” he says. “West Australians love to get outside and they hate cloudy, rainy days. We hover at that boundary between the interior and the exterior all the time. And that’s a really interesting driver for the work.”

The house is located in Mount Lawley, an inner-city suburb with many Federation-era cottages, some post-war Mediterranean-inspired housing, and walkable, neighbourly streets. The clients, a professional couple with one child, wanted their home to feel like a sanctuary, with cool, light-filled interiors and passive heating and cooling wherever possible. The need for privacy and shelter from the elements came up a lot in early conversations, and eventually gave the project its name.

“When I was talking with them I found myself using the word ‘filter’ repeatedly to describe design ideas,” says Hagemann. “The west and east breeze screens filter the light and heat. The front landscape screen filters the view of the interior from the street. Inside, sliding timber screens and ribbed glass on doors filter views between areas. It quickly became an obvious name for the project.”

Like many of its neighbours, the home has an enclosed garden and shady verandah for taking in the street life. Unlike its neighbours, however, the garden doesn’t stop at the front door but instead continues as an internal ‘street’ running from north to south and expanding into a central courtyard. This provides an alfresco dining area for the warmer months and also means low northern light can find its way into the centre of the home in winter. Ensuring that the garden was integral to the plan, rather than added on at the end, was achieved in part by working closely with landscape architect Alexandra Farrington from the start.

Another distinctive yet practical element is the use of exposed block work, reminiscent of the work of the late Bulgarian architect and artist Iwan Iwanoff. Arriving in Perth as a post-war migrant in 1950, Iwanoff established his own practice in 1963 and went on to build a handful of homes and civic projects in Perth and Northam, many using unadorned concrete blocks. A former client of Andrew’s loved Iwanoff’s homes, which led him to look more closely at this unique collection of buildings.

“Although I didn’t want to simply replicate Iwanoff’s work, I could see the sense in using concrete blocks as a thermal mass material in Perth’s climate, as well as for its sculptural qualities. It’s an amazingly diverse material. And when the light hits it, and you get that dappled effect, it’s just transformed.”

For this project, the concrete breeze block is a soft alabaster colour, its density a rare match for the desiccating heat of a summer afternoon. “It’s the directness of masonry that I like,” says Hagemann. “There’s something so immediate about it. Plus it’s low maintenance, load-bearing and you can use it as screening.”

Hagemann’s father was a builder who moved from Germany in the 1960s, and Andrew spent much of his childhood playing on the building sites that transformed the city during the 1980s building boom. A qualified builder as well as an architect, he has always loved the mix of practical and creative problem-solving that architecture demands, and the challenge of working with different materials to create a unified whole.

“As a kid, I was always building cubbies and making things out of timber I found lying around. My German family were all architects and engineers and builders, so there’s this very long lineage and this career was a natural fit for me.”

What stands out in the Filter House is the confident handling of familiar, robust materials. Raw masonry, off-form concrete soffits and burnished concrete floors are softened by the warmer tones of plywood and marri timber cabinetry, creating an overall effect of understated richness.

The home has achieved a 7.1-star rating under natHERS, in part thanks to the excellent cross ventilation created by having two thinner plans side by side, and the shading provided by the first-floor master bedroom on the western side. Although there is air-conditioning, it is only used at the peak of summer.

For his clients, the home is a retreat, just as they intended, and provides a versatility of space that has been particularly valued over the last two years. There is room for visiting family, spaces for working from home, and always a sense of living in, rather than alongside a garden.

“Visually it’s all connected, but as you move through there are varying degrees of privacy and connection,” says Andrew. “There’s no reason you can’t have big ideas with a small project.”

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