Australia’s best designed house: Night Sky, Blackheath NSW, by Peter Stutchbury

A relatively modest-sized brick house has won the nation’s highest design honour for residential architecture.

Australia's best-designed home brings the night sky directly into the living room.

Night Sky – a relatively modest-sized brick house in the Blue Mountains of NSW – has won the Robin Boyd Award for Residential Architecture, the nation’s highest honour for house design. The house was designed by Peter Stutchbury Architecture, and this year’s award marks a record fourth win for the firm, including last year’s for its design of a beachfront house in Sydney’s Mona Vale.

Night Sky was commissioned by astronomer and engineer Basil Borun, who uses a wheelchair. It was the first time Stutchbury had to design an entire house to accommodate someone in a wheelchair and, he says, the most challenging part of the process was allowing for the occupant’s needs while still creating an interesting work of architecture.

Robin Boyd winner Night Sky, by Peter Stutchbury

“The client wants to be able to stay there for the rest of his life so the building had to be able to change as his needs changed,” says Stutchbury. “It’s got to be flexible enough so that it can end up being just a bedroom, a bathing area and a sitting area … the house needed to be able to contract to that level of simplicity. The hard bit was turning those requirements into a house that provided anyone who visited it with architecture as its guiding principle. You always want to keep your work as elemental as possible, but you still want to make it great architecture.”

Robin Boyd winner Night Sky, by Peter Stutchbury

This year’s National Awards jury, chaired by Alice Hampson, referred to Stutchbury as a “masterful author”, and said that the design of Night Sky deftly managed to combine simplicity with an inventive architectural statement. The jury also said that the house was a reminder of one of the forgotten but fundamental principles of architecture: “the development of a relationship between humans and the bareness of space”.

The 130 sq m house was constructed on an empty block in Blackheath and took three years to build. It was designed so that its owner could move from his car to anywhere in the house with just a single turn of his wheelchair. Every room is off a central hallway that is wide enough for a wheelchair to turn easily. “We reduced everything down to what was absolutely essential,” says Stutchbury. “And we weren’t scared of putting the utility functions of the house with the rest areas, so his workshop is at the end of the corridor, it’s not over in the garage where it would traditionally be.”

 

There is a second bedroom with a small bathroom that could accommodate a carer if needed. It is also totally off the grid: a provision has been included for wind-generated power at a later stage, there are underground water storage tanks, and the roof has more than enough solar panels for its current energy needs.

Robin Boyd winner Night Sky, by Peter Stutchbury.

The house was built from reclaimed bricks acquired from a nearby building that was demolished. Stutchbury, along with architect Fernanda Cabral, decided to leave the bricks as they were a rather than cleaning them, which gives both the exterior and interior a raw, unadorned appearance.

“Architects always want to refine and polish things back and this house really has no decoration at all,” says Stutchbury. Everything has been left in its original state. The light fittings are basic bulbs, the wall fans are industrial versions, and the internal floors are brick and concrete. In the bathrooms, the recycled bricks, glazed for waterproofing, have been used instead of ceramic tiles.

But the building still manages a grand architectural gesture: the main living space’s parabolic vaulted roof structure. “I asked Basil what his favourite form was,” says Stutchbury, “and he said the parabola, so we made this big vaulted ceiling, which really shows the power of the form. The room has a great silence to it and it keeps your head moving and looking up, which an inclined or flat ceiling wouldn’t do.”

Shafts of light enter through carefully placed glass bricks.

Being able to look up was fundamental to the client’s enjoyment of the house, so the design includes a 3.5m long by 2.5m wide elliptical retractable skylight in the vaulted ceiling that is tiled 20 degrees to the south so that its owner can gaze at the stars.

One of the house’s more unusual aspects – and one that almost defies architectural convention – is the absence of a northern orientation. “Many of my colleagues have asked why the building doesn’t open to the north, but northern light would have destroyed that room,” says Stutchbury. “That room had to be a winner to make the building a work of architecture and we wanted it to be a fulfilling enclosure, and it’s so serene.” He describes being in the vaulted room, with its brick floor and ceiling with shafts of light entering from the carefully placed glass bricks, as like being “in a womb and totally enclosed in brick”.

Designing a house for someone who uses a wheelchair taught him some important lessons, Stutchbury says – specifically, that a house should be flexible so it can easily adapt to the occupant’s changing needs. But he says it also allowed him to refine the planning a lot better – not so much the three-dimensional space, but the way a houses plan can be tighter and work better and be reduced to its essential elements, and that you don’t need more space to live better.

“Designing this house also reinforced the idea that a big building can actually have a lot of limitations,” he says.