Design commentator Karen McCartney explores the significance of Melbourne architect John Wardle’s recently listed Kew home.
I have visited and written about John and Susan Wardle’s Kew House over the past 15 years, watching the design iterations respond to family life and the demands of working from home, to shifting aesthetics and private passions. The result is a house completely calibrated to life in the 21st century with atmosphere and tactility derived from an instinctive response to materials, a flow of spaces through expert planning and a sensitivity to its setting that makes it utterly unique.
Right from the outset, the design was engineered to engage with the city view, and the expansive glass frontage is determined by the space between the established elm trees. Their distinctive craggy bark also influenced the blackened texture and tone of the timber façade treatment. “Rather than use fabulous materials we try and work fabulously with rudimentary materials,” Wardle says of the board and batten cladding system he developed. Views are important to Wardle, and he challenges himself to see how far the view can be drawn into the building. Hence, the two-storey window wall has a special ‘mannered cut’ which angles the window dramatically towards the view.
In the most recent renovation cycle he points to future-proofing the house by adding a lift and a new generous study with its views, its moveable display walls and its crafted table, all designed by Wardle. “In a family home, I like that idea of containment but also the ability to reference the world beyond—to contemplate your own garden or at look across the city,” Wardle says.
As a long-term collector, Wardle has designed the house with integrated hanging systems for art, ceramic displays and books. Even the walls themselves can read as art with specially commissioned glazed Japanese tiles that are bespoke for each space, be it the kitchen, powder room or bathroom. Wardle is driven by research and the appeal of handcrafted skills imbues the house with a creative care factor that is rare even amongst houses of this design calibre.
The front section of John’s home is designed to sit between two ancient elm trees.
The house also links to the broader Melbourne context using found materials. Granite from the demolished BHP House in William Street, Melbourne, was reclaimed and used for the stairs in the entrance sequence. They are now softened by planting, and the house feels well integrated into its elevated position, with established planting part of the experience of the house and its site.
In 2020, Wardle was named the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal Winner, 20 years after the Kew House won the AIA National Award for Interior Architecture. In the issue of Architecture Australia, which celebrated his gold medal award, Bruny Island neighbour, novelist Richard Flanagan wrote, “I think it’s his curiosity and wonder at the smallest things, a near manic joy in divining beauty in the overlooked every day and the ability to transform materials and space so that we might see both anew with his exalting eye.” And this really sums up Wardle’s ability to combine his manifest skill as an architect—looking at site and structure—combined with a finely tuned sense of detail and an understanding of what materials can achieve when expertise is applied.
Also on a more prosaic level—this is a robust family house where children have been raised and grandchildren have played, meals have been enjoyed and life has been lived. It is architecturally excellent, it is immensely clever and thoughtful in its interior design but at the end of the day it is a home that is welcoming and sincere and it is this sum of the parts that makes it extraordinary.
Aside from timber, tiles are one of the other primary materials in John’s home. John sourced the green bamboo tiles in his powder room from a factory he’d visited in Japan, that hadn’t been made for 40 years; the tiles were remade especially for John.
Timber is used extensively in the most recent refurbishment, as seen in the corridor to the living room. The art hanging system comprises a dowel affair recessed vertically down timber panels, allowing for easy rearrangement of artworks.
Timber lines the walls, floors and joinery in John’s study space. The architect has abstracted Louis Kahn’s Fisher House window seat—a tribute to one of John’s favourite works since he was a student.
The two-storey window wall has a special ‘mannered cut’ which angles the window dramatically towards the expansive city view.
