This Meticulously Crafted Concrete Home is a Minimalist’s Dream
Perched on Melbourne’s bayside beachfront, this family home by Rachcoff Vella Architecture celebrates a robust and raw material palette.
Perched on Melbourne’s bayside beachfront, this family home by Rachcoff Vella Architecture celebrates a robust and raw material palette.
When Melbourne architect Tony Vella, director of Rachcoff Vella Architecture, was approached by a couple with four young children and three dogs to create a home on Melbourne’s bayside beachfront, the brief was a challenging one. They wanted a home that could stand up to all the "trials and tribulations a family could throw at it"—but it also had to be architecturally ambitious and stand out from the more conventional "fishbowl" architecture that lines the promenade.
The home is located across from one of Melbourne’s bay beaches, and it needed to easily accommodate the family’s regular beach visits. "From morning swims to summer days on the beach, the home is intrinsically connected to the sun, water, and sand," says architect Tony Vella.
Tatjana Plitt
"The clients’ ambition for the project set the bar high," reveals Vella. "They wanted a minimalist approach with a restricted material palette that was limited in complexity but defiant in individual character and charm."
The brief called for the same timber to be used for the cladding internally and externally, with no visible treatment. As a result, the architects specified a pre-aged, recycled timber that inspired the name of the home—Silver Linings.
Tatjana Plitt
A minimal palette of only five key materials—recycled silver timber, off-form concrete, brass, white oak joinery and a selection of bespoke, handmade fittings and fixtures—was employed to craft the home.
"The more limited the palette was, the more successful we saw the outcome being," says Vella. "When researching materials that didn’t require a finished application of some form, it didn’t leave us with much to choose from—especially as we wanted them to be natural, raw, and primarily gray in color tone."
One of the biggest challenges was prototyping, sampling, and testing to determine the correct formulas and process for the materials. "Concrete, for example, when poured in different environmental conditions produces different results," says architect Tony Vella. "This doesn’t always work for a homogenous architecture." As a result, the concrete was one of the most expensive elements of the home. "It was extremely detailed and very laborsome, but definitely worth the investment," reveals Vella.
Tatjana Plitt
See the full story on Dwell.com: This Meticulously Crafted Concrete Home is a Minimalist’s Dream
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