Innnovation: Architecture that furnishes the experience

Doing detailed, useful joinery is not the most remunerative aspect of Nest Architecture’s projects but it is always a hallmark of their work.

Emilio Fuscaldo​ believes inbuilt furniture is what makes a home out of a house of walls. “Architecture is the space” he says. “The joinery allows the home to work.”

In every room of the refurbishment and extension to a four-bedroom, brick Queen Anne house opposite Fitzroy’s Edinburgh Gardens, new joinery is more than storage: “It provides the experience you want to have in the room”.

In a projecting window bay in the study, an inbuilt daybed looks down an avenue of elms. “We built the seat to allow that experience to be fulfilled.”

The adjoining master bedroom is reduced from “palace scale” by insertion of a freestanding cupboard that on one face is a leather bedhead, and on the other a walk-through wardrobe.

The angled and modernist new kitchen/sitting/dining extension has joinery so multi-functioning, says Fuscaldo “that it pulls the project together”. A semicircular couch is customised cabinetry. “And it’s how you furnish an odd-shaped room,” Fuscaldo says.

“We worked the joinery very hard. But furniture is also architecture and once it’s installed, it can then recede”.

The most individuated part of the house is the his’n’hers two-level backyard studio/cellar built on a battle-axe plot around a corner from the house.

In the depression once occupied by a swimming pool, a small, in-sloping, timber-clad building has an artist’s studio above, and a man-cave/wine cellar in the sub-basement. The joinery here is the nightclub-worthy cocktail cabinet.

Freestanding cabinetry in the house creates sub-spaces, strategic corners and changes the house’s circulation patterns. Elements also provide enough of the suggestion of walling that Fuscaldo believes is essential “to be able to furnish a room.”

Overall, he says, the comprehensive gig “was one of those special projects where there wasn’t a clear division between the architecture and the interiors. It was all one thing”

www.nestarchitects.com.au