New Balgowlah house 'gives a suitcase of memories'

Luigi Rosselli knows this new Balgowlah house is a very different project to the usual cutting-edge residential in the portfolio of his busy architectural practice.

“It broke the mould because while it is wholly contemporary, it does have a feel that it’s been there for years.”

That was the brief from the client who didn’t want her family home, as Rosselli reports, “to look all sterile and magazine architecture. She wanted comfortable”. 

So in the “Balancing Home”, with its upper floor of bedrooms aligned east to west, and contained in a white and apparently totally shuttered gabled wing, and the living rooms downstairs housed in smaller a north-south rendered brick wing painted a shade called “Ox Blood”, Rosselli, project architect Edward Birch, and interiors firm Decus​ reckon they gave their client “a suitcase of memories”.

“There is the traditional; the pitched roofs, the gables and shutters, even the chimney is a traditional element that people like Frank Lloyd Wright used as a symbol of the domestic.”

While quietly chic in its decorative restraint, the house’s summary premise is that what is familiar is what evokes the essence of “home”.

“Balancing” refers to the project as a totality but also to its component parts – the balance struck between the projecting upper floor and the grounded lower floor that are tied together by the gable theme, and the balance of the cantilevers that overhang and make a front porch and covered pool terrace at the rear.

The balance of recognisable forms and features aligned with function. The shutter effect, for instance, says Rosselli, “is so suitable to tropical architecture”. White and timbered, it balances the rouged solidity of the lower floor. “And while looking like the upper facade is all shutters, only some are real. Some are wall cladding”. 

Internally, it is modern practicality but again with past references – the steel framed windows and particularly the divider between foyer and sitting room could be Deco. 

Again, the novel inventions, such as Edward Birch’s design for the walnut bookcase within the kitchen-living space sits close to his period-evoking expressed frame kitchen joinery that Decus’ Alexandra Donohoe​ toned to be dark beneath a high skylight. The charcoal tone throws a blue table into the foreground as furniture whimsy.

Otherwise, the black-white scheme goes as far as a black encased bath mutating into the charcoal tiles rising to a traditional dado height. Black-white is another artful tweak in the joining brackets of the roof trusses.  

“Different”, says Luigi Rosselli. “For us it was a house of experiment, but also great fun to make it look like it had been there a long time. That was tricky without it becoming kitschy.”