John Wardle Architects: From designing a sheep farm to a Chinese mini-city

Bruny Island, off the south-east coast of Tasmania, has a population of 600, give or take a few. The ruggedly beautiful island is half a world away from Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, a bustling hub of technology, industry and transport with some 14 million residents in its administrative area and one of the busiest airports in the world.

Yet there is at least one similarity: the work of John Wardle Architects.

In 2012, the Melbourne-based firm’s Shearer’s Quarters project, a home on a sheep farm built with remnants of Tasmania’s apple industry, was named winner of the villa category at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore.

At the celebration of international architectural excellence, the firm’s principal, John Wardle, met the president of a privately owned Chinese development company, Chengdu Wide Horizon Investment Group.

Four years later, the developer got in touch with an intriguing proposal. They wanted the Australian practice to join a suite of international architects working on Luxe Lakes, a 17-square-kilometre masterplanned development along the south extension of Tianfu Avenue in Chengdu.

By the time it’s completed in the early 2020s, Luxe Lakes will house up to 150,000 people in a range of prestige apartments and freestanding homes. Commercial spaces, schools, hotels and extensive parklands are part of the development, which is designed around a huge man-made lake.

To put the colossal scale of the project in perspective, the land area is nearly three times bigger than Melbourne’s city centre.

Wardle says he was fascinated by the remarkable ambition of the project. “We were attracted to it after witnessing the quality of the stages of Luxe Lakes now complete,” Wardle says. “It has allowed us to translate our experiences of designing individual family homes and high-density apartments into a project that shifts scale and context into a new realm.”

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John Wardle Architects has designed five 26 to 30-storey residential towers with two or three apartments – mostly three-bedders – a floor, as well as full-floor penthouses.

The apartment floor-plates range from 175 to 300 square metres – much bigger than most apartments in China, says Mathew van Kooy, a senior associate at John Wardle Architects.

“They’re apartments for living,” van Kooy says. “They have all the amenity that a house has. They’re effectively houses in the sky.”

The five buildings frame courtyards, each with its own different landscaped character defined by its topography and plantings.

“We have created a distinct landscape character for our precinct, one of an invented logic of elliptical courtyards which inform the scalloped envelopes of the five residential apartment towers.”

Chengdu’s relatively mild climate influenced the decision to incorporate expansive balconies overlooking surrounding parklands.

“These balconies are an extension of the living space. They function as outdoor rooms which frame the views and provide privacy when required,” van Kooy says.

Inside, the terracotta tiles are arranged from red to a pale ecru in a vertical gradient, a palette that draws the rich, red earth from the landscape towards the sky.

The firm has also designed 60 freestanding lakeside villas. The three-storey, five-bedroom homes are on average 600 square metres internally.

Sales in the section designed by the Melbourne firm aren’t due to commence until 2019 or 2020, so prices have not been confirmed yet. The average off-the-plan price for apartments already sold is 11.4 million yuan (about $2.12 million), according to the developer. Freestanding homes have been selling off the plan for about 36 million yuan, with price rises in excess of 60 per cent for resales.

For van Kooy, international projects such as Luxe Lakes require Australian firms to rethink their approach to their work. “It’s often a balancing act of understanding priorities, suspending your disbelief and embracing the immense opportunities that come along with the experience.”