A clever creation of cubes: A young designer's career-making project

Playing around with a composition – “backwards and forwards, pinning it up and critiquing it until it clicks into place and you know you’ve got it right” – is the instinct the best artists use.

It’s the gut feeling that Carlton North building designer David Tennant of Sync Design heeded during the design phase of a three-bedroom, three-level new house in Doncaster when he swivelled “the front box” 45 degrees from the square, “and the whole form suddenly read right”.

In one deceptively effective move, Tennant crafted an outstanding corner house as “an arrangement of cubist forms” that the judges of last year’s Building Designers Association of Victoria awards recognised as “a beautifully resolved mass” and “a strong design” by a creative who has demonstrated “exceptional ability”.

For a young firm (Tennant is 32), working for a young client couple and with relatively young tradespeople Concept Build, the house – set back on its site, and elevated on a grassed slope that is shaped “to soften the house form” – is a remarkably assured piece of work.

And having won the residential design new houses ($550,000 – $1 million) award, it will probably become a career-making project for the practice. Doncaster Residence is, as Tennant says, in keeping with Sync’s preference for minimalism.

The exterior materials – polished concrete render, timber, glass, matte-black window frames and high placements of black, full-stopping aluminium cladding above the windows – are matched by what he calls “the monochrome minimalism” of the interior design by his wife, Carly Tennant.

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But as with that swivelled front cube that gives the downstairs living space such framed, elevated aspect over the eastern suburb without having it blasted by the western sun, there are other carefully calibrated elements that make this house such a unified, satisfying composition.

The glazing elements are not randomly placed but rhythmic in relation to each other and they take the glass all the way to the floor plane on each level. Above most of the windows is the black “pediment capping” that, like the lawn curve, counterpoints the strong vertical planes of the place.

The glazing, says the designer, was modelled before any of the materials were chosen so that the window size and placement created “a particular ratio” in relation to the solid walls.

“The glazing becomes a break in the walls. A lot of time was spent making sure everything worked so that we were happy, the clients were happy, the builders were happy and the win was so unexpected.”