2021 Houses Awards: New House over 200m² – joint winner

Jury comment

Located on a sloping remote landscape, Federal House is both hard and soft. The existential experience of inhabiting this ancient landscape is acknowledged through the confidence of the building as a discrete object, announcing “I am here.” However, the quiet and elegant form is the first mediation between inside antd outside: the apparent solidity of the object is deconstructed by fine-grain timber battens.

The interior experience of this house might have been a neatly contained but detached experience of one’s surroundings. Instead, the interior establishes a layered connection to place and between overlapping activities. This is achieved using a deep verandah-like space that converts the hallway into a covered outdoor room, a type used similarly in colonial homestead buildings and, more acutely, in Asian architectures as layered and sheltering threshold spaces.

The section anchors the house to the site in the lower-ground spaces and has a reciprocal anchoring effect on the user, controlled through interiority and human scale. Literally grounding the project is a sheltered black-concrete subterranean pool, linked to a planted void at the heart of the home. From the entry above, this void allows glimpses through ferns to the still body of water beneath. Federal House recovers the calmness of shade and shadow where only certain textures become available, such as the silver patina of the crown of wood grain.

For further coverage, read Andrew Leach’s review of Federal House.

The Award for New House over 200 m ² is supported by Brickworks. See full image galleries of all the winning and shortlisted projects here.

Federal House is located in Federal, NSW, on the land of the Bundjalung people.

Project credits

Architect: Edition Office Project team: Kim Bridgland, Aaron Roberts Builder: S. J. Reynolds Constructions Engineer: Westera Partners Landscape designer: Florian Wild