Brutalism as Shelter

The word “brutalism” carries baggage. People picture coldness, severity, or a concrete box with little care for life inside. That is not what we mean when we use the word, and it is not what we pursue.

For us, it is a question of shelter. It is mass, shadow, few materials, and depth. It is architecture that carries weight without being heavy-handed.

The misunderstanding is that this is plainness. In fact, the best work in this territory is sculptural. It is subtle. It is about the play of light across a surface, the suspension of mass, the reveal, the tension between protection and openness. It is not a blank box. It is sculpture over plainness.

Shadow is relief
Shadow is not a negative. Shadow is relief. It slows the eye. It underlines proportion. It renders bright moments more vividly because they arrive by contrast.

When we design with mass, we are not designing for intimidation. We are designing for protection and calm. A thickened threshold can make arrival feel like a transition rather than a collision. A deep reveal can temper light and create refuge. A courtyard wall can hold privacy while still allowing air and sky to be felt.

Fewer materials, more meaning
A restricted palette is not an aesthetic limitation. It is a way of concentrating attention. When there are fewer materials, junctions matter. Scale matters. Light matters. The building has a better chance of ageing well, because it is not dependent on surface novelty.

Weight does not need to feel cold. It can be deeply inhabitable when it is paired with warmth of light, considered proportion, and spaces that receive the body properly.

Lineage, lightly
People sometimes arrive with references like David Chipperfield. We understand why. What we respect from that lineage is the quiet authority of massing, the clarity of considered simplicity, and the confidence of restraint. But the goal is never to imitate. The goal is to apply the same rigour in service of domestic life, shelter, and atmosphere.

Proof in our work
VJP and AJL carry the qualities people often associate with this territory, without the harshness. They hold mass and shadow. They limit materials. They use depth, reveal, and sequence to shape calm. They show that weight can be composed, and that restraint can still be generous.

If we had to summarise our position simply, it would be this: weight and restraint can produce architecture that is calm, protective, and deeply inhabitable.

Related Projects: VJP Residence, AJL.

Related reading: On Openings, The Entry, Atmosphere as the Vessel for Life.

The Thick Wall

We sometimes think of a room, or even a house, as something carved from a wall. The wall can be the whole from which space is extracted, or it can be the threshold that divides two worlds.

This is not a literal idea only. It is an architectural one. Thickness is depth. It is clarity. It is protection. It is security. It carries tradition. Thickness suggests quality and integrity, not because it is heavy, but because it takes responsibility for shelter.

In many contemporary homes, walls become thin lines. Openings become holes. The transition between inside and outside becomes abrupt. The result can feel exposed, flat, and visually noisy.

A thick wall is a different proposition. It slows the home down. It allows arrival to be composed. It gives a window depth and meaning. It turns light into something you move through, not just something you receive.

Entry threshold
We care about the entry because it sets the emotional register of the home. A thickened entry is not simply a door. It is a moment of compression before release. It is a place where shadow prepares the eye for light, and where the street falls away.

This is where calm begins. Not in a stylistic flourish, but in a deliberate transition.

Courtyard edge
Courtyards are often understood as open space. We think of them as architectural, 'outdoor rooms'. The perimeter of these rooms, the courtyard wall, can hold privacy while allowing the sky to be present. It can receive light, slow it, bounce it, soften it. It can make outside feel close without being exposed.

A courtyard is not a mere amenity. It is an engine of atmosphere.

Window reveal
A window is never neutral. A deep reveal changes everything. It frames viewlines. It holds shadow. It protects from glare. It makes the outside legible as a composed scene rather than a raw panorama. It gives the wall substance, so the building feels carved rather than assembled.

In our work, openings are rarely treated as simple voids. They are thickened, calibrated, and often aligned with movement so that the home becomes cinegraphic. You do not see everything at once. You move, you pause, you discover. Light arrives where it is needed, not where it is easiest.

Lineage, lightly
If someone thinks of John Pawson when they think of thickness, it is often because of his attitude towards proportion and discipline of reduction. We share respect for those fundamentals, but we apply them to domestic life in Melbourne and Victoria, with its shifting light and its need for both openness and shelter.

Proof in our work
NPW, HMM, and LDS Residence I show what thickness can do. Courtyards, layered apertures, and careful reveals allow privacy and outlook to coexist. The home feels composed rather than exposed, protective without becoming closed.

The thick wall is not nostalgia. It is a tool for making atmosphere. It holds shadow, frames light, and gives domestic life a sense of refuge.

Related Projects: NPW, HMM Residence, LDS Residence I.

Related reading: On Openings, Courtyards, The Entry.

Warm Minimalism is not Absence

People often use “warm minimalism” when they are caught between two instincts. They want clarity, calm, and a contemporary home that feels resolved. At the same time, they fear something sterile, machine-like, or emotionally distant.

The misunderstanding is that restrained homes are defined by what is missing. In reality, the strongest homes in this territory are defined by what is present, and what has been chosen deliberately. Restraint is not a style of removal. It is a way of living with intention.

A restrained home can be deeply personal. It can be more engaging, not less, because every element is asked to carry weight. Light has a job to do. A threshold has a job to do. The palette must earn its place. When there are fewer moves, each move matters more.

Warmth is not decoration
Warmth in architecture does not come from adding objects. It comes from how a space receives you. It comes from proportion and sequence, from softness and shadow, from the way surfaces carry light.

In our work, warmth is often held in a small number of materials that age well over time. Hard plaster, for its sheen and fine irregularity, is never flat. It changes across the day. It gives light something to catch. Terracotta carries character and variation and a certain casualness. It refuses to be sterile. Limestone has resilience and an understated luxury. It feels composed without needing to shout.

A restrained home is not impersonal. It is more deliberate, more profound, and in its own way, more pure. It frames daily life rather than competing with it. It does not ask to be noticed, yet it rewards attention. This way of living is not for everyone. But for those drawn to it, it brings clarity, order, and a quieter kind of richness.

The home as a vessel

We think of a home as a vessel for life. The role of architecture is not to dominate, but to support and heighten experience.

When a home is calm, you become more present. When the plan is coherent, you move through it without friction. When the palette is restrained, small changes become meaningful: morning light across plaster, the temperature of stone at dusk, the shadow of a reveal deepening as the day slows.

This is where restraint becomes more than a look. It becomes a discipline. It asks for editing. It asks for patience. It asks for fewer decisions done better.

It is easy to make something sparse. It is much harder to make something spare and generous at the same time.

Lineage, lightly
We understand that cultural shorthand for this approach sometimes leads people to designers and architects like Vincent Van Duysen or John Pawson. What we take from that lineage is not a style, but a sensibility -  a focus on proportion and restraint, and a regard for light as a material in its own right. The aim is always to make spaces that feel inevitable, not composed.

Proof in our work
LPS Residence and HMM Residence show that restraint does not mean emptiness. They show how clarity can still be sensuous, how a small palette can still hold variation, and how atmosphere can be built from light, depth, and material honesty rather than ornament.

If we had to summarise our position simply, it would be this: warmth comes from intention. From what is chosen and protected, not from what is added.

Related Projects:LPS Residence, HMM Residence.

Related Reading: Atmosphere as the Vessel for Life, On the Gesamtkunstwerk, Time as a Material.

Atmosphere as the Vessel for Life

Architecture is often discussed in terms of image, but lived experience is shaped by quieter qualities. Space, sequence, light, proportion, and atmosphere determine whether a home feels calm, generous, and supportive of daily life.

At Davidov Architects, we design architecture where atmosphere is the primary outcome.

Atmosphere is not decoration. It is the lived quality of a place. It is how a home centres you, shelters you, and allows life to unfold without distraction. Atmosphere is also the emotional register of a home, shaped through light, proportion, and sequence.

In Victoria, atmosphere matters. Light shifts across seasons. Shadows lengthen, soften, and retreat. Coastal glare, winter low sun, and the long tones of afternoon light each ask something different of a building. A home becomes meaningful when it is designed to receive these changes, not resist them.

A facade is a single moment. Living is a sequence. A home is experienced through arrival, threshold, movement, and pause. It is defined by how spaces open and contract, how views are framed, and how light enters and recedes over the course of a day. These qualities determine whether architecture feels calm or exhausting to inhabit.

Brutalism, at its best, is not aggression. It is material honesty, thickness, shadow, and permanence, architecture that shelters first and becomes more convincing over time.

For this reason, we are cautious of architecture that relies on image alone, or complexity for its own sake. Visual impact may be immediate, but it does not automatically translate into an enduring lived experience.

We approach the home as a series of composed views and lived scenes. Openings are deliberate. Light is borrowed. Courtyards, walls, and voids create depth, privacy, and atmosphere. An opening is never neutral. It shapes how the outside world is perceived and how the interior feels.

Longevity does not happen by accident. It is a design decision, protected across hundreds of choices. We ask practical and experiential questions throughout the process. How will this be built. How will this detail age. How will the space feel in morning and afternoon. Where will the hand touch, and what will it learn over time.

Time is a material. Patina is not failure. Architecture that ages with dignity becomes more familiar, more grounded, and more humane.

Building can be stressful, not because clients lack judgement, but because decisions carry weight. Our role is to steady the process. We explain design rationale, provide clear options, and use visual tools to make space and atmosphere legible. Some clients want close involvement. Others prefer trust and clarity. Both are valid.

What matters is that the finished home feels inevitable. Familiar in the deepest sense. A vessel for life that supports living over decades.

Related reading: Our Process and the Editorial archive.

On Openings

Architecture reveals itself most clearly at the moment it allows something to pass through it. Light, air, view, a body, time.

An opening is never neutral. It is not simply the absence of wall, or floor or roof. It is an act, a decision, a position taken on how a building relates to the world beyond it - how you will relate and interact and how the outside will interact with you.

In much contemporary work, openings are the result of division. Walls are split apart, pulled back, erased in service of plan, program, or transparency.

There is another way of thinking about openings. One that begins with the assumption that the wall matters.

To pierce a wall rather than divide it is to first acknowledge its mass, its weight, its continuity - its integrity. The opening is not made by separating, but by carefully cutting into something whole - something valuable. It is less violent, more deliberate, and often quieter. The wall remains present, and the opening gains meaning because of it.

This distinction, subtle as it may appear, produces very different atmospheres.

Louis Kahn was the master of the opening. In his Bangladesh parliament in Dhaka, openings are simultaneously sculptural and graphic. The walls remain heavy, almost immovable, and yet they are alive with openings that feel inevitable and expressive. At the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, apertures are treated as moments of passage and compression. The thickness of the wall becomes a place in itself, a zone where inside and outside briefly coexist.

Elsewhere, Claudio Silvestrin’s Neuendorf House in Majorca operates with similar consideration. Its openings are celebrated and deliberate characters: sometimes they are measured incisions within continuous surfaces, other times they appear as slices cutting walls in two.

What these projects share is a respect for mass. A belief that architecture begins not with void, but with substance.

Within our own work, we have explored both approaches. We have split walls open to create generosity and connection. We have also pierced them, carefully, to test how little is required to admit light, view, or movement. Over time, the difference has become increasingly apparent, not just visually, but experientially.

As our work evolves, we are consciously moving away from buildings that read as extrusions of the floor plan. Plan remains essential, but it is no longer sufficient. We are more interested in architecture as a three-dimensional condition, where walls are volumes, not lines, and openings are shaped with intention.

An opening asks a question of a wall. How much can be removed without diminishing what remains? How deep must it be to feel generous rather than exposed? How can it admit the world without surrendering the room?

These are modest questions, but they carry weight. They affect how a space feels at different times of day. They shape how we move, where we pause, and how architecture reveals itself slowly, over time.

National Parliament of Bangladesh | Louis Kahn

Neuendorf House | Claudio Silvestrin

Related Projects: EPSC Residence, HMM Residence, LDS Residence I.

The Architecture of Temporariness

I was listening to a podcast today. Not on architecture. I tend to avoid design content when I am trying to switch off because it leaves me more agitated than relaxed. But one word in this unrelated conversation caught me: temporariness. It stayed with me. The term is both fleeting and grounding, a reminder that the moment is always moving and yet still available to be noticed. Thinking in terms of temporariness lifts you out of distraction, then returns you to the present with greater clarity.

We move quickly. We rush from task to task, place to place, absorbed in our screens and the immediacy of what is required. It feels like presence, but it is not. We are attentive to the task rather than the atmosphere. The mind is full, but not mindful.

Temporariness reveals how the here and now is always shifting. Sometimes this is dramatic: a storm breaking open the sky, a burning sunset, a full moon rising. These moments grip us, then fade.

More often, temporariness is subtle. A cloud softening the light. A quiet shift in colour from morning to afternoon. The slow movement of leaves casting patterns across a room. These small changes are where most of life unfolds.

Architecture becomes meaningful when it is designed to receive these shifts. A walled courtyard that captures the movement of the weather and turns the sky into a kind of theatre. A large skylight that frames the heavens and makes passing clouds legible. A deep reveal that slows the transition from inside to out. These elements anchor us by giving form to what is otherwise easy to overlook.

To design with temporariness in mind is not to seek spectacle. It is to make the ordinary visible again. It restores the capacity to notice the world as it changes around us.

The temporary is always there. Architecture, at its best, helps us stay conscious of our place within it.

Related Projects: Sorrento Bathhouse, RZTK Residence.

Photographed by Bernie Wright

Still Point

This piece began as a conversation.

Last month, Hannah Abbott from Otomys invited me to join a panel discussion with Helen Redmond as part of Still Point, the exhibition marking the gallery’s fifteenth anniversary. Sitting beside Helen, surrounded by her paintings, I realised that the themes we spoke about that afternoon reached far beyond the event. They touched on the foundations of my architectural education, the buildings that shaped me, and the way I think about light, order and restraint.

My connection to Helen’s work is longstanding. I have admired her paintings for many years and am fortunate to live with one. It hangs in our meeting room, directly behind me when we present projects. Her work feels familiar not because it depicts recognisable spaces, but because it captures something essential about how space behaves. The paintings are distilled rather than descriptive, built from simple forms and planes, yet animated by the way light moves across them. Shadows soften unexpectedly. A ceiling glows where logic suggests it should fall into shade. Surfaces hold both clarity and mystery. The work is neither photographic nor digital. It belongs to a different language, one that speaks in atmosphere rather than representation.

Seeing a new series that Helen had painted specifically for Villa Alba brought me back to an early moment in my training. When I finished my studies, a tutor encouraged me to visit two buildings: Peter Zumthor’s thermal baths at Vals and Le Corbusier’s monastery of La Tourette. I had studied them academically but experiencing them was transformative. I arrived at Vals late at night with no camera, which now feels like a gift. The next morning the building revealed itself slowly. Water tracked across stone. Light was treated almost as a rare commodity, slipping into dark corridors, halls and rooms in a way that amplified its presence. It was architecture understood not through image but through sensation, and it left an impression I have never quite shaken.

La Tourette offered a different lesson. Where Vals felt elemental in form, La Tourette was elemental in ritual and culture. Its concrete frames carved the sun into narrow intervals, dividing time as much as space. Light there was disciplined and structured, almost liturgical. Together, these two buildings taught me that architecture is not only the arrangement of volumes but the shaping of light, proportion and restraint. They formed the early architecture of my thinking long before I knew what my own work might become.

This is why Helen’s paintings struck me so strongly when I first encountered them. They echoed that early experience. They captured the way light misbehaves, how it ignores diagrams and reveals unexpected qualities within the simplest forms. Her work is a study of what happens when form becomes a vessel for atmosphere. In that sense, the paintings feel closer to architecture than to image making. They are a reminder that light is always the true subject.

In our practice, this pursuit of light is shaped by constraint. Every project begins with a site, a family, a budget and a set of competing needs. These limits are not obstacles. They are the conditions through which meaning emerges. Within them lies the opportunity to create spaces that breathe, that register the seasons and the passing of the day. The most poetic moments often occur in the in-between spaces, the corridor, the entry, the stair. These are the places where contrast, shadow and proportion can work quietly and powerfully.

Technology has changed how we communicate this intention. For years, restraint was difficult to show. Clients would look at early renders and search for the design, assuming that simplicity meant incompleteness. As our ability to model the movement of natural and artificial light has improved, we can now show how a room transforms across the day, how material and light work together, how clarity can be more expressive than complexity. Light becomes the organising principle.

During the panel at Otomys, we spoke about this shared territory between painting and architecture. Sitting among Helen’s work, I was reminded that both disciplines are attempts to capture the intangible. Both search for that moment of alignment when form and light settle into equilibrium. In architecture I often think of this as the still point, the moment a project reveals its essence, when proportions start to cohere and the dread of the blank page turns into the excitement of emergence.

This is the pursuit that connects Vals, La Tourette, Helen’s work and our own practice. It is the search for clarity within complexity, for atmosphere within structure, for light as the quiet protagonist. The buildings that shaped me early on taught me that architecture becomes meaningful when it transcends function and enters the realm of experience. Helen’s paintings remind me of this every day.

Related Projects: LDS Residence I, RZTK Residence.

A Season Begins Anew at MPavilion

A new season of MPavilion has opened, the third to be held within Tadao Ando’s quiet and exacting contribution to Melbourne. For us at Davidov, the pavilion carries a particular resonance. Circle|Square, the winning chair design we created for the program, has lived within this space for three years now. It has been a privilege to watch people inhabit the pavilion, to watch it reveal itself in different seasons, and to return again and again with a mixture of familiarity and anticipation.

I have visited this place at many times and in many states. In the brightness of morning when the concrete seems almost weightless. At night when the pond becomes a mirror of the city. On busy afternoons filled with chatter and on quiet days where the air seems to hold the structure still. Yet returning tonight, on a mild spring evening with the sun low and the water pushing its rippled reflections along the concrete walls, the building felt new again. Something had shifted, or perhaps I had. The space carried a clarity that was both unexpected and profound.

As a musical performance unfolded, the architecture insisted on being noticed. The pattern of the spacer bar blanks, deliberate and unwavering, established a rhythm that shaped the atmosphere as much as the sound. The slot window, impossibly thin, impossibly long, impossibly straight, cut a single uncompromising line toward the garden. Through it, the landscape became a curated fragment, a reminder of Ando’s belief that to frame nature is to honour it.

For a pavilion, it offers little in the way of shelter. The breeze moves freely across the water. Rain, when it arrives, is felt as much as seen. Yet this absence of protection is not a deficiency. It is the architectural proposition. The structure defines space with walls, openings, and a singular cylindrical core, but it never fully closes. Instead it choreographs thresholds. It separates paving from pond with the certainty of a diagram, while the surrounding trees and even the skyscrapers seem to lean toward the interior as if curious about what is taking place within.

This is Ando’s restraint at its most distilled. Every line, every surface, every void is doing only what it must and nothing more. The discipline is intense. The effect is calming. The lessons are ongoing.

Each visit to the pavilion reveals yet another insight into how Ando crafts space. And in this new season, as the pavilion begins its next cycle of performances, conversations, and quiet moments, it is an opportunity to be reminded of why architecture matters. More than offering shelter, it is because of its ability to frame the way we view our environment and our place within it. 

The Missing Conversation

We speak often about buildings, but rarely about architecture.
We discuss housing supply, heritage overlays, budgets and schedules; the tangible mechanics of building, yet seldom the invisible qualities that truly define it: space, sequence, light, proportion, the way a room opens or holds its breath.

This absence says something. Architecture is the most public of the arts, yet it attracts the least conversation. A painting hangs in a gallery; a building frames our lives. We walk through it, rely on it, inherit it. And still, we seldom pause to talk about what it means - what it does to us. Perhaps we take it for granted. Or perhaps, as with many of the arts, it has been gently side-lined, replaced by conversations about efficiency, cost and compliance.

But architecture is a barometer of culture. It records what a people value - its priorities, its aspirations, its spirit. Every era leaves a spatial trace of itself. When a culture stops talking about architecture, it stops asking what kind of world it wishes to inhabit.

Too often, the conversation that remains is about size and status - how large a house is, how many bedrooms or bathrooms it holds, how many Instagram-able moments it contains. We talk about finishes, not light; inclusions, not atmosphere. Yet these metrics say nothing of how a home actually performs - how it feels, how it breathes, how it shelters. The absence of this deeper dialogue has reduced architecture to inventory, when its real measure has always been experience.

Louis Kahn once said, “A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasured.” In his work, walls hold light as if in conversation - silence made visible. His buildings remind us that architecture is not just about function but about dignity, about giving shape to human experience. To talk about architecture, then, is to talk about time itself: how we live within it.

This is not to romanticise the discipline or ignore its practical demands. Architecture will always be tethered to construction and cost, to regulation and delivery. But the conversation could afford to reach further - to speak of atmosphere, material, and meaning. To ask not only what we build, but what we are aiming to create beyond the mere brief.

The loss of that conversation is not only to architecture’s detriment; it is everyone’s. When discussion narrows to procurement and façade, imagination is limited and numbed. We begin to see buildings merely as commodities. Yet architecture at its core is about achieving more, more than the brief, more than compliance, more efficiency, more GFA. How do you add delight, intent, craft and care? How do you make a space worthy?

Perhaps architecture’s quietness has worked against it. Unlike theatre, music, or film, it doesn’t demand our attention all at once. It often reveals itself slowly, across seasons, through occupation and use. But that slowness is also its gift. It asks us to notice - to tune our senses to the way light falls on a wall, or how a threshold shifts the mood of a room. In a world increasingly distracted, architecture’s patience might be its most radical quality.

To revive the conversation is not to intellectualise the everyday, but to reawaken curiosity. To ask: how does this space make me feel? What does it allow? What does it deny? These questions belong to everyone, not just architects.

If art can stir emotion, if music can bind memory, then architecture can ground us. It can lend coherence to our daily rituals, shape our sense of belonging, and quietly mirror who we are.

Perhaps, then, the missing conversation is less about architecture itself, and more about us, about what we choose to notice, to value, and to build.

The Entry

Among all the spaces that make up a home, the entry is perhaps the most overlooked. It rarely appears in a client’s briefing document. Yet it is the first and last moment of every visit, the space that negotiates between the world outside and the life within.

When we begin to plan a home, the location and composition of the entry are critical. In this small zone, many different performances unfold: waiting for the door in the rain, greeting a group of guests, lingering for farewells and doorway conversations, slipping on shoes, or presenting flowers and a bottle of wine. The entry is a small stage - sometimes with a cast of many, often with only one actor - where architecture must quietly manage light, movement, and mood.

From a planning perspective, we look to accommodate not just the ergonomics of these rituals but the emotion that accompanies them. The entry should offer shelter and privacy, a moment of pause that smooths the transition from public to private life. It must be practical yet ceremonial, allowing for everyday comings and goings while still holding a sense of grace. A light that spills across the threshold, a covered step, the sound of a door closing softly - all these small gestures signal welcome and belonging.

Architecturally, the entry is both a space for standing and a space for passing through. It holds stillness and movement at once. We often draw on Frank Lloyd Wright’s idea of compression and release - a sequence that moves from dark to light, from narrow to open. This rhythm creates intimacy and drama in quick succession, preparing the body and the mind for what lies beyond.

A well-designed entry is not simply an access point but an emotional calibration, a first act that sets the tone for the rest of the home.

In several recent projects, we have explored how the entry can also test the boundaries between inside and out. By manipulating light, enclosure, and view, the threshold becomes ambiguous - part garden, part room. Screens, courtyards, and overhangs allow the space to breathe, extending the welcome before one even crosses the door. In this way, the entry continues the conversation we began with the courtyard: both are transitional territories that invite a slower rhythm of arrival and departure.

At its best, the entry performs two tasks simultaneously. It must function with absolute clarity - logical, sheltered, effortless - yet it should also evoke emotion, creating the briefest moment of theatre in the everyday act of coming home. For all its modest size, the entry remains a deeply human space, one that reminds us that architecture begins not with walls, but with thresholds.

Related Projects: EPSC Residence, RZTK Residence, LDS Residence I.

The Carry List

During my childhood my family and I moved often. 

There was a ritual I learned to resist. I would open drawers, repack small things I had not used since unpacking, then carry them to the next address for the process to be repeated. It was a feeling that made me feel weighed down, inefficient and burdened. 

Inadvertently each move taught me two important lessons, firstly to travel lighter and be conscious about what you acquire, secondly to learn to let go and not fear the act. Of course, learning this as a child when debating comic books or toys is easier than decisions on furniture or art - but the discipline was ingrained.

After completing my architectural studies in 2007 I backpacked around the world for nine months. I still clearly recall meeting a traveller somewhere in Croatia - he was travelling for a few weeks carrying only a small rucksack and a neat box that held a phone, a camera and a few essentials. My own pack, already bulging, felt excessive by comparison. That freedom and lightness he demonstrated have guided me for two decades, whether on the road or at home.

I was tested a year ago. My mother handed me 3 boxes she had been holding since I moved out and no longer wanted to be responsible for them. They contained all kinds of paper work and knickknacks, my report card, invitations, newspapers from the day I was born, and a favourite teddy. As I sifted through the boxes examining each object I asked - If I kept these relics, who were they for and what would they serve? I let them all go. Reflecting back a year later I feel light and liberated. You don't have to be tied to things, nor cluttered by them.

Yes your home is a container for your life - but what do you want it to contain? The spaces we form and curate around us are more than their contents, often it’s the absence that makes way for the freedom we are hoping to possess. 

On the Gesamtkunstwerk

Architecture and the interiors it holds are inseparable. The most compelling work reads as one thought carried through many scales, from the composition of the plan to the turn of a handle.

The idea is ancient, but it found its distilled form in the modern tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk: the total work of art came into vogue in the late nineteenth century. To invoke it today is not a call for excess or control, but for coherence. A building should feel inevitable, as though plan, section, detail and furnishing were all born of the same language, the same hand.

In practice, this means working from the outside in and the inside out at once. Site, climate and program set the first conditions. From there, form and threshold establish how the building meets light and landscape. Grammar and punctuation follow: the structure’s expression, the significance of a junction, the invitation of shadow, the dialogue between materials.

At the interior scale, the same language is held. Materials are restrained so each becomes essential. Details repeat so the eye can rest and the hand can predict. A stair set into a slab, the return of a cabinet, the turn of a rail, all carry the same consistency of thought. With this foundation in place, loose pieces can enter freely and with confidence.

Furniture, lighting and art are not always part of the commission, but increasingly they become part of the process. Clients often invite us to help assemble collections or design key pieces that complete the rooms. Recent travels, including Milan Design Week and the development of our own furniture, have sharpened that focus. We are drawn to pieces that work harder than they look, that hold material truth, and that continue the architectural conversation across scales.

Our pursuit is not the totalising ideal of a century ago. Life resists perfect control, as it should. The ambition is quieter: to hold a clear vision across scales so that a house feels calm, legible and incomplete in a way that allows for change and evolution over time. Architecture that sets the tone. Interiors that resonate with it. Objects that belong, enhance, and allow life to unfold.

Related Projects: EPSC Residence, LDS Residence I.

Heidi Museum of Modern Art

Reflecting on Australian Modernism

Last month I had the privilege of speaking at the IID’s annual conference, hosted at Tollmans. My sincere thanks to the IID for the opportunity, and to Tal Goldsmith Fish for the kind invitation.

In preparing for the talk, Tal suggested that the audience might enjoy case studies of Australian homes. That prompt led me to revisit our work of the past decade through the lens of Australian Modernism; a theme that has long shaped how we design.

Alongside our own projects, I highlighted works that have been enduring influences, including Harry Seidler’s Killara House and McGlashan Everist’s Heide II. Taking the time to reflect on these precedents, and on the homes we have designed both on the Mornington Peninsula and in more urban settings, was a welcome gift.

What struck me most came after the talk, in conversation with colleagues. I was surprised; in the best possible way, to hear how distinct our work appeared when seen alongside that of our Israeli counterparts. In a world that feels more globalised every day, realising that our architecture continues to carry a clear sense of regional identity was rewarding in itself. It reminded me that architecture is always a dialogue between the universal and the local: informed by global discourse, yet grounded in the particularities of place, culture, and climate. For us, that means embracing the material honesty, spatial clarity, and connection to landscape that have long defined Australian Modernism, while continuing to evolve these qualities for contemporary living. To see that identity recognised by peers from another part of the world was both affirming and inspiring.

A Cave not a Computer

We were recently interviewed by Jonathan Jacobs on the Behind the Build podcast and prompted to reflect on our approach to architecture. The conversation touched on familiar themes in our work: pared-back forms, warm natural tones, texture, and a restrained execution. While summarising, I found myself saying, almost instinctively, “we prefer a cave to a computer.”

In many ways, that phrase captures much of what drives us. Architecture, at its best, is a place of refuge and escape. It is an antidote to the pace and pressure of contemporary life. Increasingly, we see our role as creating environments that stand apart from the digital world - not in opposition to technology, but as an intentional counterbalance to it.

The metaphor of the cave is not about darkness or retreat, but about depth, protection, and calm. It is a reminder that spaces should shelter, soften, and restore. In contrast, the “computer” suggests efficiency, speed, and constant connectivity - qualities that are necessary in many areas of life, but not the ones we believe should define the home.

Our mission, in an era of AI integration and ever-present screens, is to design spaces that allow for disconnection. We conceal technology where possible, integrate it discreetly where necessary, and give primacy to the tactile and the timeless. Render, stone, timber, and light form the architecture, not the devices that inhabit it.

Call me a hermit, but I will always retreat to the cave. For us, the enduring value of architecture lies in creating environments that nourish, restore, and endure - places where life can unfold freely, away from the glow of the screen.

Behind the Build: Robert Davidov - Davidov Architects

The White City of Tel Aviv

When I am in Tel Aviv, it is hard not to be seduced by the architectural heritage of the White City ; a collection of some 4,000 buildings constructed from the 1930s onwards, now recognised by UNESCO as the world’s largest concentration of Bauhaus and International Style architecture.

Many of these buildings stand in various states of disrepair. Yet their essence remains striking: the clean horizontality of cantilevered balconies, the narrow “thermometer” windows, the geometric massing and flat roofs. These elements, originally transplanted from Europe and adapted for a Mediterranean climate, have weathered a century of sun, salt, and use. They inspire not only through their original forms, but through the patina of daily life and the countless adaptations that have allowed them to continue serving the dense urban fabric at the heart of the city.

Walking the streets, there is always another discovery. A brise-soleil screen casting delicate shadows, a balustrade with a handmade curve, or a terrazzo pattern worn smooth underfoot. Each detail tells a story of modernism translated into lived experience, shaped as much by residents as by architects. The White City is less a static museum of modernism than a living canvas, where buildings evolve organically with time.

Beyond the Bauhaus legacy, older parts of Tel Aviv reveal a rich layering of styles. Eclectic architecture from the city’s early decades; a blend of European, Middle Eastern, and Art Deco motifs, is now being carefully restored, bringing back a vibrancy that speaks of cosmopolitan beginnings. Just as compelling is Tel Aviv’s remarkable collection of brutalist buildings, many of which rise in unapologetic contrast to the refined modernism of the White City. Together, these overlapping styles form a complex architectural identity that is both regional and international.

To walk through Tel Aviv is to understand how architecture has shaped not only the city’s fabric but also its spirit. The White City, together with the Eclectic and Brutalist layers that sit alongside it, reflects a vision that has continually fuelled the dynamism of Ir L’lo Hafsaka, the city that never stops. Here, the work of architects over generations has contributed to a vitality that feels both historic and immediate, making Tel Aviv a place where architecture and life are inseparable.

The National Library of Israel

Last month, while in Jerusalem, I had the opportunity to visit the recently completed National Library of Israel by Herzog & de Meuron.

I had first seen the site on an earlier trip, when the monumental exterior was nearing completion. The building is clad in Jerusalem stone, its surface patterned with distinctive cuts and irregular openings. Immediately it brought to mind a particular course of stone blocks near the top of the Western Wall that had always intrigued me. (Fig 1) It is a detail anyone familiar with the Old City would have passed countless times, yet here it has been observed with care and distilled into something new and quietly resonant. This ability to translate the vernacular into the contemporary without imitation is one of the project’s most impressive qualities.

Behind this protective stone envelope, the organisation of the library is legible and calm. Circulation flows with ease, guiding visitors almost instinctively. At the heart of the plan, the great reading room sits enclosed behind glass, illuminated by daylight from a vast circular oculus above. From afar, this skylight presents itself as a window into the building, a symbol of openness and accessibility. It suggests that knowledge, though carefully preserved, remains something to be shared, not locked away.

Internally, the architecture feels shaped less by the hand of the builder than by the forces of time. The entry sequence, staircases, and major forms have an organic character, as if eroded by natural weathering or gently carved by centuries of human touch.

Figure 1. The Western Wall, Jerusalem

Outside, Micha Ullman’s Letters of Light adds a quiet counterpoint to the building. The work has two parts. A heavily textured tunnel, set below grade, leads to a concrete cubic room where three skylights are cut in the shapes of the first letters of Israel’s official languages: Hebrew, Arabic and English. Above ground, twenty-two large boulders of Jerusalem stone carry voids that trace the Hebrew alphabet. The letters are not carved as objects. They appear through absence, held by light and shadow. The piece sits calmly against the library’s monolithic form and extends its interest in material, daylight and legibility into the landscape.  

Materially and spatially, the building is defined by a conscious pursuit of survival and longevity. Spaces are robust yet carefully detailed, intended to withstand the wear of generations while offering moments of clarity and lightness. The architecture acknowledges its dual responsibility: to safeguard fragile texts and artefacts, and to invite the public into a place of learning and reflection. This duality - protective yet open, weighty yet transparent - is resolved with remarkable poise.

For a national library, this approach feels entirely fitting. It is a vessel for the preservation of memory, designed to carry cultural heritage forward into an unknown future. By embedding echoes of Jerusalem’s ancient fabric into its very form, the building affirms its belonging to place while remaining undeniably contemporary. In doing so, it stands not only as an archive, but as a living monument - a testament to continuity, knowledge, and endurance.

Space for Nostalgia

In our work, we often seek clarity, spaces stripped of ornament and freed from superfluous detail. Yet, in the quiet of that restraint, a question lingers: when expression and overt context are pared away, how does a space hold on to its vitality? How does it maintain proportion, intimacy, or intrigue?

A room is never only a volume. It is a vessel for memory, for light, for the slow passing of seasons. It is the particular quality of shadow in the late afternoon, the sound of footsteps on a timber floor, the faint scent of rain carried in from an open window. These intangible elements are what lend permanence, what allow a space to become not merely functional, but alive.

One of the challenges we often set for ourselves is the play between the familiar and the abstract, the comfort of something expected versus the purity we seek through distillation. To do this, we strip an idea back to its core DNA. We ask: What is this space really about? What makes it work? Once we understand that, we can decide what is essential, and what can be discarded.

That DNA can be found in proportion, materiality, texture, symmetry, acoustics, and the sequence or procession through space. These qualities are not tethered to any one culture or style, yet they can be infused with meaning and manipulated to create emotional resonance.

Proportion is one of our most powerful tools. It’s in the size and placement of an opening in a wall, how it pierces the surface, revealing its depth. It’s in the way light passes through that opening, blending spaces together or holding them apart. It’s in the way a view unfolds, slowly or all at once, leading the occupant from one experience to another.

But restraint comes with risk. Pared-back minimal spaces can easily slip into sterility; cold, clinical, lifeless. For us, the solution lies in looking to the past, not to replicate it, but to reinterpret it. We find lessons in historic architecture: the way light grazes a worn stone wall, the way a timber beam frames a view, the way spaces are shaped to invite pause. These references remind us that simplicity need not be empty; it can be rich, layered, and deeply human.

For us, the enduring moment in any building is achieved through the sequence of spaces, the way they relate to one another, whether clearly defined or softly blurred. It’s in how they respond to what lies beyond their walls: the shifting light, the movement of landscape, the expanse of sky. This orchestration creates something more than shelter. It creates places that live in the memory, spaces that feel inevitable, as if they could never have been otherwise.

In the end, that is the true measure of success: to craft a space that endures. One that is spare, yet vital. One that can be rediscovered again and again, revealing new layers over time. One that is capable of carrying nostalgia; for those who have known it, and even for those who have only imagined it.

Impressionism & Architecture: Seeing with Squinted Eyes

On a recent trip to see French Impressionism from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at the National Gallery of Victoria, I found myself moved anew by the power of these works. The exhibition, part of Melbourne’s Winter Masterpieces series, brings more than 100 Impressionist paintings to Australia, many never before seen here; by Monet, Renoir, Manet, Degas, Cassatt, Morisot and their contemporaries.

Though I’ve studied Impressionism, visited the Musée d’Orsay, and attended similar shows, seeing these vibrant, liberated works in person felt incredibly uplifting. There is a sheer delight in the way they frame the everyday, humble houses, winding streets, open fields, each rendered with astonishing energy and economy.

What struck me most was the way the artists stripped buildings back to their absolute essence. Intricate detail is gone, yet the form remains: the rhythm of rooftops, the mass of a wall in shade, the sharp cut of a silhouette against the sky. Roof and base, light and shadow. Architecture distilled to its most elemental. It is something I often think about in our own work: how a space or a building is perceived through narrowed eyes, when the noise is removed and the fundamental is amplified.

One of the most compelling reminders of this came from Monet’s Haystacks series—dozens of paintings of the same subject, yet each transformed by the light and atmosphere of a particular moment. These are fundamentally the same image, but what matters is the time of day, the season, the shifting conditions. This is very much how we think about the spaces we design: as experiences that are rediscovered again and again across the day, the year, and over decades of living in them. Light changes. Shadows move. Material patinas deepen. The architecture is constant, yet it never presents itself in quite the same way.

The Impressionists were not concerned with faithful documentation, but with evoking sensation, the way light falls across a garden path, the mood of a street at dusk. In our architectural practice, we seek something similar. We aim to create spaces that capture a mood, spaces that feel alive and resonant.

Walking through the exhibition, I thought about how, in design, limits can bring freedom. A reduced palette, a simple structure, controlled views and indirect light often result in a building that feels more considered, more deliberate. The Impressionists achieved this through brushstroke and colour; we aim for it through material, form and sequence.

Seeing this exhibition renewed my conviction that our approach shares much with that of the Impressionists: a focus on perception, light, simplification, and the clarity of experience. However, just as an Impressionist painting captures a fleeting moment and invites the viewer in, we aim to create architecture that allows people to inhabit lasting ones.

The Destination

When you engage an architect - What is the destination? And how will you know when you’ve arrived?

Often, there’s a vision; a feeling, a quiet clarity. You can see yourself sitting in your favourite chair, in a particular room, with a particular view. You can picture the movement of shadows, the softness of the light, the echo of footsteps, the texture of the walls.

Getting from here to there is the architect’s role. But before pen ever meets paper, we need to download that vision - or at least your version of it - from your mind. To understand what matters, what lasts, and what home truly means to you.

Clients often come to us unsure of how to describe what they want. That’s okay. In many cases, they look to us to help crystallise the vision, test possibilities, explore potential, and drive the process forward. It comes down to two things: good communication—and trust.

From there, we often joke that there are 10,000 decisions to be made, probably more. Our job is to tackle the vast majority of them, distilling complexity into clarity. Through drawings, visualisations, and thoughtful conversation, we help you see the path ahead, with one eye always fixed on the destination.

Along the way, we experience what we think of as “mini-destinations”, those moments where everything clicks into focus. The language of the project becomes clear. The fog lifts. The idea sharpens. But nothing compares to the moment of true arrival.

Because architecture is never just bricks and mortar. It’s not just stone, glass, or timber. It’s the realisation of something imagined, and more. It’s how space can hold feeling, respond to mood, and evolve with time. It’s the quiet sense of rightness that arrives when something you once only hoped for becomes something you could never quite have imagined, yet now couldn’t imagine being without.

Perspective & Presence: A Reflection, Tarrawarra & Its New Centre

Over the years, I’ve returned time and again to the TarraWarra Museum of Art. Perched above a sculpted lawn, Allan Powell’s original museum building has long impressed itself into my memory; a massive, blank façade that once struck me as forbidding. Defensive, even. A castle on a hill. But with time, what once felt imposing now reads as protective. Familiar. The same wall that once challenged me now welcomes me, shields me. It’s a shift that speaks less to the building than to my own evolving perspective.

The original 2003 design brought together a museum and restaurant, linked by a courtyard that still feels monolithic and primal. Concrete forms rise from the earth like a modern-day stonehenge; assertive, ambiguous, and sculptural. That in-between space is not transitional but atmospheric. It announces that art, here, is something you move toward with intent.

The recently opened Eva and Marc Besen Centre, designed by Kerstin Thompson Architects, extends the experience with humility and quiet strength. Set behind the Powell building, it gently follows the existing crescent avenue, a gesture of deference and dialogue. The echo in form is deliberate, yet the contrast in materiality is striking: where Powell’s original wall is heavy and massive, Thompson’s new elevation is light, woven, and permeable. A stainless steel mesh softens the back-of-house functions, providing glimpses of the life within while maintaining a measured restraint.

The Besen Centre houses visible art storage, learning spaces, and areas for performance and community engagement. It literally supports the museum, its green roof doubling as the visitor carpark, and symbolically reinforces the museum’s foundational ethos: that art, education, and landscape can exist in quiet, enduring harmony.

The museum’s collection, gifted by Eva and Marc Besen, contains hundreds of works of Australian modern and contemporary art. But more than just a collection, it’s a gesture of cultural trust, a belief in the value of public access to art, and the importance of creating an architectural context that honours it.

Revisiting TarraWarra with the addition of the new centre felt like a jolt of clarity; a reminder of the power of restraint, and the joy that comes from resolution. Durable materials. Controlled views. A reverence for sequence. And above all, a deep understanding that architecture, like art, shifts meaningfully over time.