Edition Office merges its ambition for material and spatial exploration with the concept of change and renewal to design a home where its clients can observe the cyclical nature of the environment during the “autumnal years of their lives.”
The Kyneton House, located in the Macedon Ranges region of Victoria, embodies the old and the new, encompassing a rustic aesthetic quality that recontextualises its surroundings. Many of the buildings in the town date back to 1850, and Edition Office has combined recycled and textural brick walls, pale low-carbon concrete floors and galvanised steel roofing to allow the natural world outside to breathe life through its rooms, by daylight tinged with external ambience.
The dining space features the Otway Dining Table and Otway Armchairs by Kett.
High, lofted ceilings cast a sense of infinite space, particularly in the adjoining kitchen and living areas, where it culminates in a centralised skylight at the peak of a triangular aperture, through which natural light pours into the heart of the property.
Each individual room is fitted with framed windows that reveal the home’s surroundings like curtains parting on a stage. The rooms are described as ‘nesting places,’ and the textural wall gesture, the starting point for the entire design process, insists on a recognition of its clean symmetry, a contrast that allows the outside to nourish the house’s internal complexion.
The Fredericia J39 Chair in the neutral study.
The Fredericia Pon Table and Trizo21 Austere Floor Light in the living room.
The garden that circles the property, inhabited in part by trees relocated from the clients’ more expansive, old rural home, is an ever-present ode to seasonal change. Edition Office was inspired by the concept of time and the house as a ‘reference point’ to its passage. There’s no air conditioning or mechanical cooling; instead, the house relies on the environment around it to nurture its internal state. For example, an air-exchange heat pump warms the floor slabs during the cooler months, when necessary.
Kyneton House’s external structural form is designed as a “constant to the garden and to the occupiers who will change, and grow and age through the seasons and years.” The garden is ever-present, and the house a repository from which to observe the fluctuating world around it. Human and natural design are in conversation, feeding its occupants a sense of “ongoing contemplation driven by changing seasons,” promising “infinite intrigue” from within their new sanctuary.
