Encore

And what an encore. I bought a block of land and decided to go the whole hog, hire an architect and build from scratch. Ho ho ho. While the house is undoubtedly an aesthetic success, it was quite possibly the worst financial decidion I have ever made, and I wholeheartedly recommend not doing what I did. For some odd reason, I decided to build a three storey one bedroom house. There is not a huge market for three level ultra modern one bedroom houses that don't have parking because I didn't want to spoil the lines of the walls.

Mustn't grumble though, the Dodds House (as it is known in architectural circles) has been featured in a few magazines (cover of Monument!) and was a finalist in the New South Wales House of the Year.

It is basically a big grey box. Construction is steel framing with compressed fiber cladding. The floors downstairs are concrete and upstairs rubber. The benchtops in the Island kitchen are stainless steel and the bathroom is clad in metallic simonite.

The louver system is motorized to provide shade or privacy, and there is underfloor heating throughout. Interesting is the way the entire back and side are glass that slide away to be completeley open to the back courtyard and side pond. The pond had a frog in it called Eric.

The mezzanine bedroom is completely open, with the yellow cupboards acting as a spine through the entire house. Obviously.

I could go on and on, but suffice to say that while I enjoyed looking at the house, I did not enjoy the three years it took to build or the double the budget it cost. But also it seemed at the end to contain more of the architects' (Engelen Moore) essence than it did mine. I think it should have been weirder.

I also had trouble sleeping in it as when the sun came up, in it came. Not to mention every noise from the neighbourhood. Still it was an experience one should do once, although next time I will just design the whole place myself and be done with it.

There are more pictures over the page that can speak for themselves.