Photographer: Derek Swalwell
Project Team: Patrick Kennedy, Rachel Nolan, Victoria Reeves, Adriana Hanna

The Park Lane house is an alterations and additions project which is also a project concerned
with urban design. Formally, the architecture is reduced to platonic volume or emblematic
and suggestive forms which serve the aesthetic and functional requirements of the interiors.
Materials are chosen for texture, durability,to support the formal expression and to delight the
owner’s and architect’s aesthetic sensibilities. What is perhaps most interesting about this
house is it’s function as a component of urban design in it’s neighbourhood. The highly
exposed site, bound by street, lane and park on three sides uses a mutually supportive
synthesis of architecture and urban design to do a lot of work. The austere and suggestive
forms which face park and lane provide a substantial presence, appropriate in scale and
quality for their role in the urban realm. Simultaneously, these forms provide privacy to the
interior which can be modulated at key points on the ground level from opaque to transparent.
A spectacular eucalyptus at the rear of the site is a gift to the project – architectural form and
program nestles under its generous canopy. The building might outlast the tree, but it’s
legacy will remain and hopefully suggest its successor.