Australia’s Rising Architects Make Their Mark

Sydney’s architectural scene can be summed up as cutting edge, creative and diverse.

As part of our special five-part global architectural series we preview three dynamic practices, whose founders are making waves globally due to their respective styles and dedication to their craft.

_{Photo: Chenchow Little / Peter Bennetts}

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.

_{Photo: Chenchow Little}

“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.”

Simon Anderson

_{Photo: Anderson Architecture / Nick Bowers}

A year spent living in Stockholm inspired Simon Anderson’s commitment to sustainability and how low-impact principals can be incorporated into modern residential homes.

“We think of ourselves as providing ‘contemporary sustainable design,’ or in other words homes that look and feel like cutting edge design, but have sustainable principals at their core, designed in seamlessly,” Mr. Anderson said.

Having established his firm, Anderson Architecture, in 2002, Mr. Anderson said the sustainable principles relate to carbon footprint and material selection, extending to the landscape the building is inserted into.

“Thermally stable design is a core value, when temperatures outside are too high or too low, the home moderates these, meaning the homes are really comfortable to live in and don’t need vast amounts of energy to regulate the temperature,” he said.

“Our design approach is born through a balance between science and art, to use the scientific feedback we gain using in-depth computer thermal modeling, that’s then balanced by the artistic desire for beauty,” he said.

Closely aligned with passivhaus, also known as passive house principles, Mr. Anderson and his team promote these to clients and allow them to decide how far they want to take the features.

“From a design perspective, tactile natural materials are important to us, there is an emphasis on the use of locally grown hardwood timber for instance, to give the rooms a warmth,” he said.

“Indoor air quality is also important to us, whether it be low VOC [volatile organic compounds] materials and finishes through to ventilation systems, [which] provide fresh air and keep warm or cool air in the home while venting stale air from kitchen and bathrooms using an HRV [heat recovery ventilation] unit.”

It could be a double-height space, a void or a strategically placed, window-framed view that adds that sense of calm or spark of joy, Mr. Anderson said. “But these design ideas are hard to describe how they come about, except for saying many years of experience informs small decisions during the design process.”

Waverley House, a new residential property in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, has become a legacy design for the studio, after the clients placed full trust in the architectural team, which allowed them the freedom to push the boundaries of what contemporary sustainable design could look like.

“This was the first house with a ‘brain’ that could think for itself,” Mr. Anderson said.

“When temperature sensors inside the house thought a room was overheating, the brain could open windows if the weather sensor outside said that was a good idea. The home was also a great example of passive solar design,” Mr. Anderson explained. “The large living space is designed to gain winter sun over the top of the double-story home to the north and allow well-insulated thermal mass inside the house to heat up, and radiate heat during the night.”

_{Photo: Tom Ferguson}

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.

There has been a substantial increase in the number of Australians earning high incomes who are renting their homes instead of owning them, and this may be another element contributing to higher market demand and continually rising rents, according to new research.

The portion of households with an annual income of $140,000 per year (in 2021 dollars), went from 8 percent of the private rental market in 1996 to 24 percent in 2021, according to research by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). The AHURI study highlights that longer-term declines in the rate of home ownership in Australia are likely the cause of this trend.

The biggest challenge this creates is the flow-on effect on lower-income households because they may face stronger competition for a limited supply of rental stock, and they also have less capacity to cope with rising rents that look likely to keep going up due to the entrenched undersupply.

The 2024 ANZ CoreLogic Housing Affordability Report notes that weekly rents have been rising strongly since the pandemic and are currently re-accelerating. “Nationally, annual rent growth has lifted from a recent low of 8.1 percent year-on-year in October 2023, to 8.6 percent year-on-year in March 2024,” according to the report. “The re-acceleration was particularly evident in house rents, where annual growth bottomed out at 6.8 percent in the year to September, and rose to 8.4 percent in the year to March 2024.”

Rents are also rising in markets that have experienced recent declines. “In Hobart, rent values saw a downturn of -6 percent between March and October 2023. Since bottoming out in October, rents have now moved 5 percent higher to the end of March, and are just 1 percent off the record highs in March 2023. The Canberra rental market was the only other capital city to see a decline in rents in recent years, where rent values fell -3.8 percent between June 2022 and September 2023. Since then, Canberra rents have risen 3.5 percent, and are 1 percent from the record high.”

The Productivity Commission’s review of the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement points out that high-income earners also have more capacity to relocate to cheaper markets when rents rise, which creates more competition for lower-income households competing for homes in those same areas.

ANZ CoreLogic notes that rents in lower-cost markets have risen the most in recent years, so much so that the portion of earnings that lower-income households have to dedicate to rent has reached a record high 54.3 percent. For middle-income households, it’s 32.2 percent and for high-income households, it’s just 22.9 percent. ‘Housing stress’ has long been defined as requiring more than 30 percent of income to put a roof over your head.

While some high-income households may aspire to own their own homes, rising property values have made that a difficult and long process given the years it takes to save a deposit. ANZ CoreLogic data shows it now takes a median 10.1 years in the capital cities and 9.9 years in regional areas to save a 20 percent deposit to buy a property.

It also takes 48.3 percent of income in the cities and 47.1 percent in the regions to cover mortgage repayments at today’s home loan interest rates, which is far greater than the portion of income required to service rents at a median 30.4 percent in cities and 33.3 percent in the regions.

Australia’s Rising Architects Make Their Mark

Stephanie Little, Simon Anderson and Toby Breakspear set the bar for creativity.

Stephanie Little, Chenchow Little

Simon Anderson

Toby Breakspear, Breakspear Architects

This may be contributing to continually rising weekly rents