Boyd one out of the box

Function lay at the heart of all the designs created by Australian architect Robin Boyd.

Boyd House, Walsh Street, South Yarra 1958. Picture: Mark Strizic.

Anyone who has ever tried to design a house will know how quickly one runs into the multiple constraints that end up making most homes seem very like all others: not only constraints of funds and of the realities of engineering, but the necessity of accommodating the same set of living and sleeping spaces, kitchens and bathrooms and storage as all other dwellings.

Designing a house then becomes first of all a matter of the layout and order of these necessary rooms, and their relations with each other: in older houses and apartments, for example, kitchens were kept strictly separate from dining rooms, even if they included an informal space for family meals. They were work places, not for public view; and in apartments, even quite opulent ones, they could be relatively cramped and squalid.

In the past few decades it has become increasingly acceptable to have kitchens opening onto dining rooms or dining and living rooms combined, but this has meant that kitchens have had to become far more luxurious and consequently more ­expensive, since the kitchen fittings are now as much a display of prosperity as the sofas and armchairs of the living room.

Such changes reflect different ways of living, and in theory the open kitchen is meant to allow the hosts to attend to the meal while entertaining their guests at the same time. It is not surprising that open kitchens have coincided with an explosion of cookbooks and cooking documentaries on television, since the food and the performance of its preparation need to live up to the trophy kitchen.

Unfortunately, the owners of these kitchens are all too often defeated by time, idleness or lack of flair, and end up ordering takeaway meals brought to them by hip young members of the gig economy or a new class of poor wretches on bikes, depending on how carefully you pay attention.

Baker House, Bacchus Marsh 1964. Picture: John Gollings.

The layout of rooms always speaks of the life that is actually led in a house. In many modest dwellings of the past, the front door opened into a hallway that gave onto the two formal or public rooms of the house: the parlour on one side and the dining room on the other. These rooms were kept tidy and spotlessly clean, even if their decor was sometimes of heart-wrenching banality. In grander houses, the same principle applied on a more ambitious scale.

In older Australian homes, the design tended to be inward-looking, a habit no doubt inherited from British domestic architecture, but also an adaptation to the heat of the Australian summer. My grandparents’ house in the country, for example, had enormous verandas all around, but the core of the house was turned inwards, with no direct views from the dining room or living room; but it was also insulated from the heat by the veranda spaces.

An architect building on the same site in the past half-century would have taken it as axiomatic that the main rooms should open onto the view across the fields and down to the river. In fact, when my father laid out our family home at Pittwater in the late 1960s, he had all living rooms, all bedrooms and even the kitchen facing towards the view.

There are advantages and disadvantages in each kind of ­design: the big open spaces looking out across the water are of course beautiful but they are not as intimate, and they can lack wall space; my grandparents’ living room had no view and was smaller in area but still had enough wall space for a piano, ­bookcases, prints and ceramics as well as the usual furniture and a fireplace.

Older houses tend to be more comfortable and cosier, but these were qualities that modernist architects like Robin Boyd, who was born a century ago in 1919, were willing to sacrifice for the sake of clarity, openness and functionality. The trouble was that suburban cosiness was too often associated, as already suggested, with clutter, poor taste and kitsch.

Boyd, who came from one of Australia’s only true artistic ­dynasties — his grandparents were talented painters, as was his father Penleigh, while his uncle Martin was a novelist, his uncle Merric a potter and his cousins Arthur and David both painters — was also a notable writer and commentator on architecture.

Interior of Featherston House, Ivanhoe 1967.Picture: John Gollings.

In his most famous book, The Australian Ugliness (1960), which I recall my father reading, he particularly deplored the poor taste of suburban architecture and design, with its mishmash of styles, its use of inept and gratuitous decorative ­elements that he called featurism, and its hatred of trees. No doubt this is partly what inspired my father to accommodate two enormous trees in the design of our house rather than cut them down.

It is fascinating to explore Boyd’s different solutions to the design of dwellings in the plans and models exhibited, appropriately, in Heide II, the new house that John and Sunday Reed commissioned in 1963, and itself a modernist classic, although in a style that is somewhat different from Boyd’s, with its distinct rooms, winding corridors and monumental limestone walls that lend it a neo-classical sobriety.

Boyd’s houses tend to be conceived as boxes or sets of boxes, which can give this kind of architecture a surprising and interesting quality but also leaves us a little unsatisfied from a formal point of view, as though some of the intellectual challenges of design have been evaded, especially the pursuit of wholeness and completeness.

One of the pleasures of a classically designed house is the sense, even from the outside, that it is a whole, while inside it is to discover how the finite space has been intelligently used to provide an entrance space, halls, well-proportioned rooms and a logical succession of spaces. Neither of these things happens if the house is a set of boxes joined as necessary.

Roofs in fact have an important role in defining the whole shape of a house, even if it is a more elaborate design with wings.

And that is one the most appealing features of the traditional Australian country house, with its main hip roof on a higher pitch and shallower roofs on the surrounding verandas. Flat roofs, as in Mediterranean houses, are an elegant solution when appropriate; but the single flat slopes of modernist houses are never very satisfying.

Featherston house, Ivanhoe 1967. Picture: Mark Strizic.

Nonetheless, one of the appealing things about Boyd’s designs is that he resurrects the courtyard, that fundamental ­element of house design in the Mediterranean from the Greeks and Romans up to the present, and one that should be more widely used in Australia too, where the weather allows us to spend so much time outdoors but where we still need shade in summer and sheltered spots to enjoy sunlight in winter.

Instead, the typical Australian suburban block has always had lawn facing the street, which can look attractive but needs to be mowed and, because of its exposed position, cannot be used for any useful purpose at all; and then behind the house was a backyard, which could be a beautifully maintained garden, full of flowers and fruit trees, but in many cases was a shapeless playground for children at best.

There is something unique about an outdoor area embraced by architecture, even if only on three sides, which is the form in which it is most nearly found in suburban houses: a patio space embraced by two rear wings and opening onto the garden proper.

In any case, Boyd’s boxes allow him to create courtyard ­spaces, as in one house, where three box units surround a central space, the dining and living room and study in the main block, with a gallery facing the courtyard, bedrooms on the right, and the kitchen, laundry and perhaps maid’s room on the left.

The Baker House at Bacchus Marsh was similarly designed around a courtyard, as was the house Boyd built for himself in Walsh Street, South Yarra. Today it belongs to the University of Melbourne and is known as the Robin Boyd Studio. An inner space, within the house, is a haven of intimate quietness, ­although when surrounded by a house with glass walls, as here, it is both overlooked by and looks into the house as though into a fishbowl.

But such openness was always a modernist theme, even at some cost to privacy. The sense of connection with nature was also an important part of these Australian modernist houses, where glass windows and decks served to open the inside to the outside and to connect the house and its inhabitants more closely to the surrounding trees and gardens.

One of the more adventurous designs here is for the Dower House added to the Baker property at Bacchus Marsh. A dower house — the expression is perhaps not familiar to everyone today — is a secondary house on an estate where, typically, the widow of the former owner would reside when her son and his family moved into the main house. Sometimes elderly parents may move there while still alive when the younger family have taken over running the estate.

The Baker Dower House is, interestingly, more architecturally unexpected than the main building, with looping walls ­dividing the house like ribbons and in one section extending ­beyond the roofline to make an enclosed garden outside the bathroom. The advantage of designing a house for a single person, or even a single couple, is that considerations of privacy and the segregation of different age groups in a larger family home do not apply.

Of all his houses, though, the one that is perhaps the most striking and intriguing is the Featherston House, one of the last works Boyd designed before his untimely death in 1971. The house looks out onto the bush, and the whole back wall is composed of glass windows with structural frames, using a ­design that Boyd himself helped to devise for the manufacturer, Stegbar.

But the most remarkable thing about this building is its ­interior, especially the rear portion, which is conceived as one vast space in which three rooms are reduced to floating levels, offset rather than directly superimposed. The bedroom is the highest of these, gaining some privacy from being only partially visible from below.

The dining and sitting rooms, one a little lower than the other, are offset by adjacent platforms nearer the ground level but not on it. Instead, they hover above an ornamental water basin and are surrounded by plants in an indoor garden made possible by the abundant light of the window wall.

Here the house has not only opened itself to the garden but allowed the garden to cross the boundary and produce a ­hybrid space, like an indoor courtyard. It isn’t cosy, and it probably isn’t very comfortable, but it must be in some respects ­exhilarating.

Robin Boyd: Design Legend

Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne ­

Until October 27