Clontarf House by Mathieson Architects - House Tour by Est Living

The house we're in today is in the Sydney suburb of Clontarf. It's an amazing spot just between the start of the Northern Beaches and the end of the North Shore. We look across southwest towards Mossburn and the entrance to the harbour is towards the east. The family really wanted to embrace the best of coastal living and capitalise on its location and part of that was really about maximising the opportunity for entertaining and really just take advantage of that proximity to the water. As a design studio we have a particular way that we approach our work from a timeless perspective. So it's relatively limited palette of materials but then part of that is introducing texture and smaller details into the way the house and the finishes are put together and giving different experiences as you move through different spaces in the house. We have this entry gate that's out of faceted steel that allows light to just constantly move and transition around and create shadows on the floor spaces. The play of light's really important in the way that we work on our projects and one of the things that we introduced in that entry area was Venetian plaster that has a real kind of lustrous reflective quality. So as you kind of enter the house you're drawn through to the view in the water. The kitchen is much more of a contrast to the rest of the house. It's very much anchored around the ability to entertain so it has a really really big island bench with a dark palette material so it has dark sandblasted tin veneer and a black granite benchtop and it's almost that transition between two lighter spaces and you have this kind of little moment of calm as you transition between the two areas. Part of maximizing the connection to the water in this house was about seamless transition between the inside and the outside treating the outside spaces almost like additional room spaces or living spaces encouraging cross ventilation through the house so the front of the house fully opens up as does the back of the house. For us it's really important about how space actually feels to be in and it is things like the sea breeze coming in or the way that light travels across a wall, the way you move through a space and it's really about those smaller moments not just about the big heroic view out to the water. One of the elements we worked with was concealing the blinds so that when they retract they're not visible and that meant we could do away with the traditional recessed pelmet and working with blind space we had a detail where the pelmet is fully concealed. It's really just revealing elements when you need them rather than always being on display. Part of the beauty of working with Shade Factor and the Warima blind system was getting really really large expanses of an awning in single elements so the rear of the house it's one single awning that projects out about three meters and the same on the water front side and then again the ability to drop down a vertical blind from that reinforces that sense of an additional room that opens out from the inside. I think one of the most rewarding things for us as a team is seeing not only the project come to fruition but seeing the client then experience the space in living it as you hope that they might and as they hope that they would from the beginning of the project and for this house it was really about that coastal environment and for the family really to be able to have a space they could gather together with their friends and enjoy it. That's probably been one of the most rewarding parts of this whole experience.