Kew House is a residential house, located at 8 Hodgson Street in Kew, Victoria, Australia. The house was designed by Australian architect Sean Godsell in 1996–1997. It is designed in a rectangular shape that cantilevers 5.5 m over a slope from the street. Sean Godsell was born in Melbourne in 1960 and is a new generation of architect in the 1990s who insists on the traditions of Modernism and the crusades for the difference in family houses' design. He is the son of David Godsell who completed a number of notable homes in the bayside area of Melbourne in the 1960s and was a prominent local architect. He is influenced by Le Corbusier while his father was more of a Frank Lloyd Wright man.
Design approach
The nature of the Kew House is different from the houses in suburbs such as Kew, North Balwayn and Beaumaris, which display the post-war optimism of Melbourne architecture. The Kew House reflects on the emergence of an Australian style using localized materials, construction and local tradition born not simply from the colonial history of Australia but also from Australia accepting its regional reality of being part of Asia.
It has an eastern planning, as there are no corridors and thus has a continuous flow of space. The house basically is a space divided lengthways which has an open planliving space to the north and interconnecting bedrooms and a study to the south. He eliminates hallways and fully enclosed rooms for his design and instead adopted an open, Asian-influenced floor plan. “It’s a symbolic gesture as well as a pragmatic one, but it forces a socialization that we need to deal with as a society in Australia. It forces tolerance within the house.” quoted from Sean Godsell.
Interior
It has an artistic interior as he himself chose carefully which artworks are to be propped against the walls and the backs of sofas, instead of how artworks are usually being hung. Sean Godsell designed a sofa, which is highlighted by an Akari standing light by Noguchi and a sculpture by Pilar Rojas. It has a 7m-long built-in table that was designed as the hub of life and daily activities in the home that runs across the east end of the space.
Throughout the house, it has natural ventilation and a passive evaporative-cooling system that uses the sloped site as an advantage. Moreover, air is circulated through the house with the use of a passive evaporative cooling system that takes the prevailing south westerly wind over the grass embankment and under the house where it flows through the floor vents to the east end of the building. The fine water mist sprays, placed at the top end of the embankment, cools down the air further.
Materials
Basically, it is made from oxidized 350 MPa steel and sealed with a clear primer. It has operable steel shutters that shade the north and west elevations of the home. The house is primordial in its intent although it has a modern language due to the use of rust, oiled second-hand boards and recycled decking which are elemental rather than processed. Recycled decking treads were used outside and Sean Godsell implemented a raw texture to the home’s modernity with the deliberate use of weathered, rough-hewn materials.
Influence of Asia
Within the house, Sean Godsell applied the Asian concepts from east and west. From the divided plan, the living area has a sliding wall that separates the space to create two areas similar to how Japanese architecture has a series of rooms that are animated by operating sliding screens.
