15/08/2026
More than a decade later, what has endured, and why?
We completed this house more than ten years ago.
Looking back at the photographs today, what strikes me most is how little the underlying architecture seems to have aged.
That doesn't mean everything is timeless. Furniture, objects, colours and even the way we live inevitably belong to a particular moment.
But the spaces still feel relevant.
Perhaps that is because we weren't trying to create a particular "look".
The architecture was built around more fundamental things: proportion, light, movement, views, material and the way a family actually lives.
The palette was deliberately restrained, white surfaces, exposed concrete, timber, steel and black, creating a framework within which life could happen.
And it did.
Books accumulated. Collections appeared. Children's rooms developed personalities of their own. Furniture and objects moved. The house was allowed to be lived in rather than preserved as a finished photograph.
Looking back, I think that taught me something important:
Good residential architecture needs enough order to hold itself together, but enough freedom to accommodate change.
There is another part of this project that remains particularly personal to me.
Throughout the house are a number of ceramic works that I made by hand.
They weren't conceived as decoration to match the architecture. Yet looking at them again, I see a connection that I probably wouldn't have articulated quite so clearly at the time.
The ceramics explore many of the same things as the architecture: proportion, repetition, rhythm, geometry, texture and material.
One is composed of repeated cylindrical forms. Another is organic and sculptural. Others are distinctly architectural, vertical compositions of planes, joints, incised surfaces and changing proportions.
Different objects, but somehow the same language.
Perhaps that is inevitable.
They came from the same hand.
Architecture operates at the scale of the building. Ceramics at the scale of the hand. But the questions we ask of them can be remarkably similar.
More than a decade later, this project has made me reconsider what we mean when we call architecture timeless.
Perhaps timelessness isn't about creating something that never ages.
It is about creating something with enough substance to age well, accommodate life and remain meaningful as everything around it changes.
Fashions change. Objects change. People change.
Good spaces should be able to live with all three.
More than a decade later, what has endured, and why? We completed this house more than ten years ago. Looking back at the photographs today, what strikes me most is how little the underlying architecture seems to have aged. That doesn't mean everything is timeless. Furniture, objects, colours and ev...
