Matilda House – For one, context is not necessarily responding to the building next door, but responding to the needs of the people and the project. It does not necessarily have to be local in terms of a visual language, it could be a subtle gesture of connecting the inside and the outside for one.
The built environment is an amalgamation of the measurable- understanding the context, the site, the existing features and its surroundings. It understands every aspect of functionality, elements of nature and technology. And there is the immeasurable. which is multi-sensory and emotive. However, if one goes past this to its historical origins, Matilda – which means “container for personal things” – also speaks to the project’s extremely personal resonance modeled on the location of the client’s childhood. The Matilda House, constructed by Harvest Building Pty Ltd, complements its surroundings while also introducing itself as a long-lasting and reliable icon. Moving down memory lane, this house was conceived as an antithesis to the inner-city weekly home and also is supposed to serve both as a retreat and an immersion.
Design | Matilda House
The design of the Matilda house speaks of the sensibilities of the client. While developing this design the architects got down to little details that made a big difference and one can easily enjoy the detailed intricacies. Templeton was hired to design a hideaway in the supposedly isolated granite hills of this northeast Victorian estate. The house is loaded with emotion because it is nestled where our client spent his early life.
With every project whether it is the windows, gates, openings, or the overall experience, the most important fact is that it takes on a new approach to the childhood memories that the client once experienced. The old cottage was taken out and rebuilt with a new house that extends out parallel to the brook further and embraces the trees that edge each curve to provide glimpses of each dip. With the rammed earth walls, Australian hardwood flooring, and wildly divergent touches like the limestone kitchen splashback, this internal link with the outside world is retained.
There is a built-in toy box beside the fireplace that is camouflaged, and there is a lot of storage space so that objects may be put away. To link everything together, plasterboard-free walls fully revealed the rammed earth.
Thus we can say that the making process of the spaces is “nothing to mass, nothing to a niche”, in some senses, is a dramatic, minimalist abode with spacious dining and living spaces and little free furniture. “We spent a lot of time trying to make the furniture look quite integrated,” says Emma.
Material and Construction
The urban environment is dynamic, diverse, and fast-paced which gives us the opportunity to reassess essential infrastructure. The choice of materials exhibited a language of handmade aesthetics. The materials were chosen to suit contemporary lifestyle and also added a human touch and created a sense of comfort while occupying the space. Despite the refinement, there is a familiarity to it as if the memories we carry are already woven into the fabric.
The choice of rammed earth as the principal and core building material has many implications, including establishing a somber tone for the balance of the house. Set among the native granite hills, the house adapts to a prolonged, low form that hugs the ground and stabilizes itself thanks to an innate and deliberately included firmness.
Australian stone and timber are combined with steel accents and matt-faced joinery to create the rammed earth blade walls. Matilda celebrates its location facing out at the environment and its annual and perennial variations via its generous and slightly trimmed glass windows as both a comfortable place to hide away from the weather and a pleasant home to assemble and gather.
No random thoughts, no hasty thinking enables the functionality, materials, process, finishes, and details to come together holistically.
The concept was anchored into the land’s natural contours, generating a sunken courtyard to the east, thanks to the material’s genuine warmth and the depth of its construction. Rammed earth was adopted due to its exceptional thermal mass and stunning surroundings because of the region’s frequently severe weather.
Sustainability
To invent a new future and to rediscover the past is one gesture but to think about future needs is another aspect and prevailing on this idea, the Matilda house preaches sustainability with the wise choice of materials and other efficient design strategies.
Rammed earth was chosen as the principal material to cope with two identities of thermal control and young children to counteract the latter. The need for endurance was a must, thus Emma says that rammed earth “seemed incredibly fitting” and “had this natural beauty.” “This gave the interior spaces a strong feel for the young boys, who run up and down the halls with their scooters, and allowed us to cope with the problem of thermal mass. A wall made of plasterboard just would not do.
Though the building is static, nature takes over and keeps changing , through the seasons, through the years. The flora and fauna are an inherent part of the building and user’s life. The way the house ages gracefully and gets assimilated in the environment it creates. The Matilda house references a social memory in its attempt to bring together the childhood of the client by exploring interventions, mapping them, introspecting, and working on new ways to engage with the earlier. In this manner, the house itself is a platform within constructed peripheries attempting to translate simple childhood memories.
References
- https://thelocalproject.com.au/articles/matilda-by-templeton-architecture-project-feature-the-local-project/
- https://archello.com/project/matilda
- https://templeton.com.au/project/matilda/
