An art-filled apartment in Sydney’s Darling Point has beaten some 158 interior design projects to the top prize at the 2016 Australian Interior Design Awards.
Darling Point Apartment by Chenchow Little received the Premier Award For Australian Interior Design at the program’s awards night on Friday 10 June, the jury praising the project’s ability to effortlessly showcase the owner’s art collection.
“Darling Point Apartment is an inspirational piece of interior design that is both innovative and excellent,” reads the jury statement.
“The exquisitely crafted interior effortlessly serves as a gallery to the owner’s high-calibre art collection. This is an enduring and endearing project in the context of Australian residential design.
Darling Point Apartment by Chenchow Little Photography by Peter Bennetts
Another of the night’s big winners was the North Lakes Office Fitout by Nielsen Workshop & Morgan Jenkins Architecture, which received awards for both Sustainability Advancement and Workplace Design.
“The designers have purposefully maximized natural light and ventilation within a building envelope that would not usually be considered as a potential site for sustainable practices,” said the jury about the North Lakes Office Fitout.
“[It] is an example of what can be achieved with a conventional building type and is an exemplar for the future development of similar projects.”
North Lakes Office Fitout by Nielsen Workshop & Morgan Jenkins Architecture. Photography by Camera Obscura
2014 Sustainability Awards winner, The Commons by Breathe Architecture was joint winner of the Award for Interior Design with Cox Rayner Architects’ Queensland Museum Refurbishment.
The winners of the 2016 Australian Interior Design Awards:
PREMIER AWARD FOR AUSTRALIAN INTERIOR DESIGN
Chenchow Little for Darling Point Apartment, NSW
Photography by Peter Bennetts
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Design statement: from the architects
This apartment fitout seeks to capture the faceting geometry of the original 1970s apartment building to give it a renewed life. The client’s extensive artwork collection is innovatively displayed with flexible joinery, allowing the client a curatorial role with its display. The apartment is designed for “empty nesters” downsizing from a large, formal family home to a small apartment. The client requested a degree of formality but also sought something novel and surprising to the interior. As a significant benefactor to the Australian art community, the client wished for the apartment to accommodate thirty to forty paintings and sculptures from a previous dwelling. Significant challenges included how to house the large quantity of historically important Australian artwork within limited surface area, and how to reconcile the display of artwork with the breathtaking views and functional planning of the apartment.
INTERIOR DESIGN IMPACT AWARD
Breathe Architecture for The Commons, VIC
Photography by Andrew Wuttke
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Design statement: from the architects
The Commons is about sustainable urbanization – a replicable triple-bottom-line development. At its core, The Commons is about people. Its architecture serves as a catalyst to unite people of similar values and build a community. Breathe Architecture set out to build Australia’s flagship sustainable apartment project. It was to be a prototype, a testing ground, an example. Breathe Architecture’s hope was that it could reset the benchmark.
The design team left out carparks, airconditioning, second bathrooms, individual laundries, plasterboard ceilings, bathroom tiling and chrome plating. Instead, they gave space, height, thermal efficiency, double-glazing, generous decks, a shared laundry and rooftop gardens, solar hot water, hydronic heating and tiny utility bills.
The designers wanted to build a place that people wanted to live in, a place they would love, a place they would call home. The apartments are affordable, sustainable, generous, easy to live in and light filled. Residents know their neighbours and most have pets. The communal rooftop, with vegetable plots, shared laundry, washing line and barbecue spaces, ensures company is always at hand.
Cox Rayner Architects for Queensland Museum Refurbishment, QLD
Photography by Christopher Frederick-Jones
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Design statement: from the architects
This refurbishment encompassed a dramatic transformation of the spatial, functional and wayfinding experience of the Queensland Museum, while simultaneously respecting the integrity of the original brutalist archi- tecture. Cox Rayner Architects achieved all objectives using one material – blackbutt – crafted into a continuous installation of multiple elements, wended from one end to the other.
The pragmatic objectives were to remedy the museum’s non-compliance with equitable access codes, and its inflexibility for exhibitions due to its narrow floor plates cut by a longitudinal atrium. But, in addressing these issues, the design team was asked to invigorate the dour brutalist spaces of the museum, long regarded by the museum as discouraging visitation, especially by families and children (and validated by surveys).
Cox Rayner Architects used blackbutt as a wayfinding device. The material forms a serpentine spine, like a continuous installation of intermediary exhibition floors, stairs, vertical circulation markers, display cases, museum shop joinery, services screens and rest points. The way the elements are connected and crafted has radically increased the flexibility of exhibition types and configurations. It has enabled visitors to explore the museum in varied journeys (where previously there was just one route), yet at the same time maintain awareness of place in the building.
SUSTAINABILITY ADVANCEMENT AWARD
Nielsen Workshop & Morgan Jenkins Architecture for North Lakes Office Fitout, QLD
Photography by Camera Obscura
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Design statement: from the architects
The North Lakes Office Fitout is an office for three tenants sharing one small warehouse in North Lakes, north of Brisbane. The warehouse itself is part of a generic industrial development and is essentially a 10 metre × 10 metre tilt-slab box standing seven metres high, with west-facing openings. The project quickly became an exercise in harnessing and manipulating daylight. The plan and section of the project hinge around three polycarbonate light wells that operate between the two levels, bringing daylight deep into the building. The aim was to create an office space that could operate with passive cooling and minimal artificial light for the majority of the year. These light wells define the various zones of the tenancy and create key moments of separation and convergence for the three tenants and their staff.
The office was designed and built within tight budget constraints and aims to challenge traditional notions of commercial office space in terms of environmental factors, materiality and enclosure.
EMERGING INTERIOR DESIGN PRACTICE
We Are Huntly, VIC
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RESIDENTIAL DESIGN
Architects EAT for Fitzroy Loft, VIC
Photography by Derek Swalwell
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Design statement: from the architects
Fitzroy Loft is a warehouse conversion inside the 125-year-old MacRobertson chocolate factory in Fitzroy, Victoria. The project is about bringing light and air deep into the home, while maintaining the integrity and context of its historical significance. Three internal voids are devised to highlight the original factory heights. While the brief called for a sizeable family home, keeping the integrity of the original factory’s bones was vital. Walls and floors that were built in more recent years were torn down to expose charred beams and remnant paint.
The interior is a series of spaces linked by three internal voids. The first void is the courtyard, which is directly connected to the main living room and the kitchen. The second void is located as a zoning device, separating the living spaces from the private zones on the lower floor. And the third void is placed at the very back in the library, displaying the original timber column and beam, and allowing the soft southern ambient light to touch the library and the mezzanine study above.
The office was designed and built within tight budget constraints and aims to challenge traditional notions of commercial office space in terms of environmental factors, materiality and enclosure.
Chenchow Little for Darling Point Apartment, NSW
Photography by Peter Bennetts
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RESIDENTIAL DECORATION
Studiobird for Theodore Treehouse, VIC
Photography by Peter Bennetts
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Design statement: from the architects
Theodore Treehouse is an inner-city modernist apartment transformed into an exaggerated and beguiling residence fit for its eccentric Bunnings-venerating and pleasure-seeking bachelor.
Architect Ernest Fooks would be distressed. His 1962 modernist apartment block, in affluent Toorak, Melbourne has been secretively transmuted into a bedazzled paradox of layered and aggrandized interventions. Orchestrated by its tenant bachelor, this one-hundred-square-metre treetop retreat fashions a “do-it-yourself” enterprise of bespoke toolbox installations and incongruous material reconfigurations.
This project throws caution and perceived spatial fashions to the wind. By meshing the eclectic desires, lifestyle and dreamworlds of the client-practitioner into a spatial transformation of this rental, the interior claims a new kind of spatial practice that is not afraid to add more to residential decoration and the interpretation of luxury living.
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HOSPITALITY DESIGN
Arent & Pyke with Spaceagency for Alex Hotel, WA
Photography by Anson Smart
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RETAIL DESIGN
Tom Mark Henry for 1888 Certified, NSW
Photography by Damian Bennett
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WORKPLACE DESIGN
Nielsen Workshop & Morgan Jenkins Architecture for North Lakes Office Fitout, QLD
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INSTALLATION DESIGN
Stukel Stone for My Zinc Bed / Blood Bank, NSW
Photography by Clare Hawley
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Design statement: from the architects
My Zinc Bed/Blood Bank is a set design for the Ensemble Theatre’s 2015 season. Minimal in style, the set is finely calibrated to suit two separate productions. A seemingly simple composition of levels and ramps allowed complex scenes to play out, graced by planes of coloured light.
Theatre budgets demand resourceful choices and clever design thinking to maxi- mize the imaginative potential of sets. For this project, the designer and theatre company determined that it was advant-ageous to combine resources to create one design shared by two productions.
The briefs, each comprising of a play script (My Zinc Bed by David Hare and new Australian play Blood Bank by Christopher Harley), meant the design was a hybrid of two productions’ requirements. The success of the project is due largely to each director’s willingness to adapt to working on an abstract set that did not provide literal information about time and place.
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PUBLIC DESIGN
BVN for Our Lady of the Assumption, NSW
Photography by John Gollings
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Design statement: from the architects
This is a twenty-first-century teaching space where the traditional classroom is replaced by light-filled spaces for teachers and children to move around as they engage in learning. By responding to the environmental imperative to creatively reuse old buildings, this new primary school is a model and leader in pedagogical design.
A challenge was turning the unattractive concrete building into an inspirational educational space. The overarching design provides flexible, open learning spaces, using materials that create a warm and natural atmosphere. Equally important was the need to produce a variety of differently scaled spaces to suit small children as well as frequent use of technology. While the existing concrete structure is partially exposed, timber floors, moveable screens, joinery with shelves, built-in seats and withdrawal spaces enable different teaching configuration.
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BEST OF STATE AWARDS FOR RESIDENTIAL DESIGN
NEW SOUTH WALES — Chenchow Little for Darling Point Apartment
VICTORIA — Architects EAT for Fitzroy Loft
QUEENSLAND — Owen Architecture for Ranley Grove house
BEST OF STATE AWARDS FOR COMMERCIAL DESIGN
NEW SOUTH WALES — BVN for Our Lady of the Assumption
SOUTH AUSTRALIA — Enoki and Alexander Brown Architects for Beresford Cellar Door
WESTERN AUSTRALIA — Arent & Pyke with Spaceagency for Alex Hotel
VICTORIA — Jackson Clements Burrows Architects for Monash University Academics' Club & Café (Church of Secular Coffee) (St Ali)
QUEENSLAND — Nielsen Workshop & Morgan Jenkins Architecture for North Lakes Office Fitout
BEST INTERNATIONAL DESIGN AWARD
Russell & George for Aésop Westgate