Australia’s Rising Architects Make Their Mark

Stephanie Little, Chenchow Little

Known for high-quality design and attention to detail, Chenchow Little has been providing architectural services since 1994, when fellow University of New South Wales students Tony Chenchow and Stephanie Little graduated.

Ms. Little said the practice doesn’t have a specific “house style,” instead  taking a consistent approach that is then applied to each client’s particular site and brief.

“We work across many scales and locations and each of these requires a unique solution,” she said.

“We like to tease out the character of both the place and the client, and express this in the building. For us, a house on the beach for a gardening enthusiast, or a dwelling in the inner city for an art collector will result in very different outcomes. We take the process of creating our buildings quite seriously, but the end result is quite light and playful.”

Central to the practice is a passion and enthusiasm for design excellence. This also means embracing diversity and identifying what is unique to a place or brief.

“Diversity extends to the people we employ and the projects we take on,” she said.

“We also place a great emphasis on the technical aspects of a project. A great building comes out of a thorough understanding of construction and how a building is put together,” she added.

Chenchow Little’s breakthrough year was 2008, when their coastal project on Sydney’s northern beaches, Freshwater House, won the coveted Institute of Architects National Robin Boyd award.

“At the time a lot of architects were doing white minimalist houses, but we were concerned that on this particular site you would need to wear sunglasses inside given the glare off the water,” Ms. Little said.

“So, we added a black ceiling, which absorbed the glare and fine battened shutters around the house to provide the interiors with a beautiful diffuse light,” she said.

Recent winners of a City of Sydney Design Excellence competition, Chenchow Little is working on a large affordable housing project, utilizing the lessons they’ve learnt from designing high-end houses.

“The design focuses on traffic noise attenuation, a short construction time frame, and the site’s industrial past to create a unique outcome, which we hope will improve the quality of life of the inhabitants,” she said.

“We have incorporated a beautiful new public park in the middle of the site to encourage social interaction between residents and give the building a dignified frontage to the street. The client was seeking a design which didn’t look like affordable housing, so they are really happy with the result. No matter the building type we love to work on projects that positively impact people’s lives.”

Toby Breakspear, Breakspear Architects

Breakspear Architects director Toby Breakspear runs a busy, ideas-driven practice, working across architecture, interiors, landscape, urban design and masterplanning.

Breakspear’s projects explore the “reciprocal relationships that emerge when architectural fundamentals are attuned to the surroundings in a rich ecology of life.”

Focused on closing the gap between architecture and nature in both residential and commercial contexts, Mr. Breakspear is most interested in emphasizing Australia’s iconic “bush” heritage within the confines of an increasingly urbanized and scale-driven society.

“In Australia we often romanticise the image of a rugged, outdoors society in tune with our spectacular landscapes,” he said.

“Exquisite lone pavilions in picturesque locations are our most celebrated form of architecture. These iconic projects propagate the myth of ‘the bush’ as the soul of Australian architecture,” he said. “The reality is that 90% of our population live in cities and historically not a great deal of thought has been given to applying this notion of ‘bush’ to our highly urbanized society.”

Compelled by architecture that is sustainable, the first two projects by Breakspear Architects, Courted House and OneA, both in Sydney’s inner west, are examples of this design approach.

Although different in scale, one is a single house and the other a large apartment complex, both projects use a courtyard version of “landscape” to offer a sense of calm within the gritty urban surroundings.

Courted House condenses and urbanizes the classic Australian wrap-around veranda by inverting the model, with a courtyard providing a sense of ‘bush’ positioned at its center.

The concept is explored again on a larger scale within the award-winning OneA apartment building where 175 dwellings are arranged around a lush communal garden allowing architecture and landscape to entwine.

“Around the central garden are outdoor lobbies, open breezeway corridors, voids to the sky, reflecting ponds and raw surface finishes that bring residents together in the constant presence of nature,” Mr. Breakspear said of the project, which picked up a City of Sydney Design Excellence Award in 2015.

“The apartment planning allows for outdoor dwelling along the building’s leafy edges. By overlapping architecture, interiors and gardens, a sense of neighbourliness is encouraged that is transforming the daily patterns of high-density living,” he said.

Mr. Breakspear has also designed the new Echo Point Visitor Information Centre, in Sydney’s Blue Mountains. Not yet constructed, the slimline structure follows the curvature of the landscape and acts as both a reference point for the region and a gateway between the visitor and ecological experience.