Creating an emotional connection to architecture is very important to us, whether through the tactility of touching the home, or just feeling this sense of calmness as you walk into a home.
Also you want to feel a sense of safety and security through the structure, and a softness and vulnerability through the materiality, achieving that balance is the hard part.

My name’s Thomas Martin, I’m the director at Rama Architects and my role in this project was the Lead Architect of the design team.

Behind the Modernist Idea of ‘Form Follows Function’ I feel that architecture is not just about the architect picking up a brief and designing something, so in the M House is this modernist idea, form follows function.

It needs to be functional first, we need to make sure the layout of the building is working, we need to make sure that the flow and the connectivity between each room is working.

Clareville is located on the Northern end of the northern edges in the Pittwater area, it’s a small suburbia and it’s on the western side of Avalon.

The foreshore is the Pittwater waterway and it’s home to many yachts, many  boats, lots of water activity and further west when we look towards the sunset we have the Ku-ring-gai National Park.
Our clients came to us with this idea of a Brazilian modernist styled home. 

We were drawn to this style of architecture because there are similarities between Brazilian climate and our Sydney climate, so what that  meant was it was about creating this transparency and this connection to the waterway and also emphasis on privacy and this idea of a sanctuary.

The plants and trees immediately engulf you as you come down the driveway and then to the left, a walkthrough of the home, you notice a small entrance to a passageway that begins the journey into the house.  

As you walk through the entry you’re greeted with this large double height void space.

To the right of the stairs is a courtyard space that opens up, it lets in this beautiful filtered light of the canopy, you’re in an indoor space but you’re literally walking past plants that are at your shoulder.

As you walk down a couple of steps you then walk into the dining area that is connected to the courtyard and onto the kitchen and a large open plan living area.

The intent for the living was to create a sunken lounge, not only to bring it back to that idea of the Brazilian modernist style architecture, but to ensure that you’re not having couches or furniture or anything that distracts from that view beyond.

As you step outside we have the beautiful terrace that is west facing and it’s got a big deep eave over that space.
The stair itself is quite shallow so we have  a really wide tread but quite a short riser. We specifically made a void so that we’re really maximizing that sunlight coming through from that Northern aspect.

We have the bridge that connects the adult and the kids portion of the home, and as you walk through a hidden door, you’re walking past a walk-in robe and then you’re greeted with the master bedroom that looks out over these planter boxes and beyond into Pittwater.

For the master ensuite we’ve implemented Marrakesh render into this space and the idea of the Marrakesh render was to create almost a softness and a sense of tranquility in this ensuite.

The pivot windows themselves, they can be cracked from 100 mm to completely 90 degrees which is quite beautiful and capture that breeze that comes through from the West.

Privacy was a big part of the client’s brief, we created this through almost a dominant, brutal front facade where we have the garage door that is seamless with front cladding and then it’s this idea of the greenery that is just engulfing the building, not only coming from the size of the building and up over the side  boundary lines, but it’s also the idea that it’s sprawling over the top of the building as well. 

We decided to lean away from your traditional balustrade being a glass balustrade so we’ve got concrete planter boxes that are set back from the eave edge and the idea was at this planting, being small natives, would be able to sprawl over the eave edge and also come back to that idea of tranquility and letting the planting engulf the architecture.

The choice of landscaping was curated by the landscape architect, it’s a really rich green, it’s not your kind of light greens or more of your browns that we see and they’re in more native Australian planting, for the M House particularly we needed to have this emphasis on durability, so we focused on this idea of concrete.

We’ve also introduced the sandstone which acts as almost like anchors, which are the columns and the blade walls of the home and that’s been softened through the tallow woods and the timbers, both internal and external.

For me creating this connection between masculine and feminine materials is just so important to architecture and design in general, you can have a brutalist or a minimalist style tone, but I think it’s important to contrast that with delicate styling, even if it’s just through planting, through an artwork on the wall, whatever it might be and what that does it creates this juxtaposition of being safe but also being vulnerable in a sense in the home.


(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bHWBM3zFoI)