Heart of stone

On an isolated spot in the Blue Mountains, an almost Zen-like calm penetrates this house forged from the idea of a 'mending wall'.

The house is named after Robert Frost's Mending Wall - "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling out". Picture: John Gollings

MOST of the houses that I have done are in sites that evoke responses to landscape, and I have been lucky enough to do houses that are mostly in the bush or country.

And so my real motivation for taking these projects, apart from the fact that I take nearly every [domestic] project I am offered, is because I don’t get many. Peter and Barbara’s land was at a fantastic site, remote and poetic – it is on the edge of the mountains.

Read more stories from Wish magazine

When I am looking to see if I want to take on such a commission – and I am doing two to three a year – I am looking for depth. I have to use my intuition to project what the professional relationship would be like if I take on a client. In Peter’s case, he wanted to call the house Mending Wall, after a poem by Robert Frost. While I didn’t know that poem, I connected it with the stone walls at nearby Mt Wilson and the most extraordinary stone fences and walls built by the kanaks who came from the Pacific and who settled in Bundaberg in Queensland, where I grew up.

Architecture is the making of place. I know it is a flip sort of term, but place is a multi-layered concept; it involves the creation of a domain in which human beings feel enriched and comfortable and participate in the things they want to. Slow architecture is what I am really interested in, and slow architecture is about growing into architecture.

Architecture is much more profound than fashion – it has to do with the human spirit, it has to do with nurturing, and relationship to place, and how it sits in the ground; it relates to the sky, the view and the air, the light and all that sort of stuff. These things take a long time to reveal themselves.

I have been blessed with having, in the main, clients who are interested in the things beyond the everyday. So they are interested in the fact that buildings contribute to the richness of their lives, whether they are house clients, or offi ce clients, or whatever; but it is this essential thing that meaning is critical to our lives, and if you can’t form a relationship with someone that involves meaning, then it is likely the result – the building you will get – will have shortcomings.

It is about having a truly collaborative intellectual relationship with the client, which makes the building so much better. I facilitate people’s aspirations.

Mending Wall, for me, speaks of a monastic life. In its extreme idea, it is monastic or an almost Zen kind of existence, because you are dealing with yourself. It is very confronting, bloody oath, because the site is isolated [some 45 minutes’ drive to shops]. I saw Barbara and Peter as wanting to be alone. This makes it harder to design and I needed them to give me a lot of pictures and things to help me feel that I could design their house. I am only interested in making interesting outcomes and I had to be open to them.

It is very satisfying, if you get it right ... it really is. Keep in mind that I don’t design houses for a living. I mostly do big buildings. I work in a big commercial office with 300 people. I don’t make any money from doing private houses. The reward is in the project itself and the relationship with the client.

Architecture is about very basic things: it is about human relationships, because we are providing environments where human relationships act out and operate. Architecture is fundamental to absolutely everything we do, so we have to build a collaborative solution. - As told to Janne Ryan

Read Janne Ryan's full story, including interviews with James Grose's clients, in the fifth anniversary edition of Wish magazine, free inside metro editions of The Australian on Friday, October 1.