Completed in 2019 in Sydney, Australia. Images by Peter Bennetts, Prue Ruscoe, Caitlin Mills. The Bismarck House is the younger sibling of a pair of semi-detached dwellings in Bondi. The design uses raw materials and sculpted spaces to.
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I like my dinners participatory. While Iâm shelling the prawns to make a cheeky last-minute broth, a couple of guests are debating the wine line-up, another is sobbing his way through onion duty, and the latecomer has been relegated to grating reggiano to a texture we all agree is just right to give the risotto a good life.
At Bismarck House in Bondi, the participation is heightened as commentary wafts in from passers-by peering through the grand aperture that opens the kitchen up to the side laneway, creating a (literal) dialogue between inside and out.
An evening flâneur approves the cooking odour; a skater coyly suggests the zinfandel over the pinot grigio. In return, one guest decides to do some yoga poses on the generous timber window seat.
Drumroll, PleaseâAnnouncing the Winners of the Dwell Design Awards
We asked an expert jury and our audience to choose the best projects of the year.
To honor the most outstanding projects we published last year, we enlisted our readers and an expert panel of judges to select the most creative, context-driven designs across eight categories for the Dwell Design Awards. The winners, runner-ups, and community picks display imagination in their form, consideration in their materiality, connection to their environments, and innovation in how they frame a way of living.
Dwellings
The Bismarck House is the younger sibling of a pair of semi-detached dwellings in Bondi.
The design uses raw materials and sculpted spaces to integrate house and garden while orchestrating social interactions between the more public areas of the house and the laneway that runs along the semi’s northern boundary.
Our conceptual starting point for the project was to map the detailed context of the laneway: a long thin footprint immediately adjacent to the gritty rear-lane access for multiple commercial properties fronting onto Bondi Rd.
Into this context the ground floor of the house was conceived spatially and materially as a continuous garden between the boundary walls of the site. The brick common wall of the semi to the south was exposed and the new laneway edge to the north was rebuilt using bricks recycled from the site demolition.