When Perth architect Gary Marinko submitted his design for the Poll house to the local council, he described it as ‘a typical single-storey house with a tin roof.’ It was a loose interpretation of typical, but then, Marinko does have a gift for understatement and the description is partly accurate. Set back from the road on a leafy street in Dalkeith, a riverside Perth suburb, it’s built from the kind of modest everyday materials – concrete, brick and corrugated metal – that appear all over the city. It doesn’t dwarf its neighbours or announce itself as something special from half a street away – quite the opposite; what makes the Poll house so intriguing at first glance is its simplicity.
Marinko had previously worked with his clients, Margaret and Jaap Poll, on a holiday home in Margaret River, Western Australia. The project had not run smoothly – he was the third architect they commissioned – and its successful, long-awaited completion was something of an achievement. When the Polls bravely decided to embark on another project, he was their immediate choice. The brief was for a single-story home with wheelchair access and a separate unit for Mrs Poll’s elderly mother, Lillian. It had to be large but thermally efficient, light and airy but also secure, and a continuous space rather than a series of rooms. ‘Gary gave full attention to what we wanted to achieve, then came up with a very simple concept. We felt we were understood,’ says Margot.
The site was levelled to give wheelchair access without ramps. This resolved one issue but, with the house now lower than its neighbours, presented a new challenge – bringing in enough light. ‘Instead of having windows on the south, east and west facades we used louvred skylights,’ says Marinko. ‘We also oriented the building towards the northern boundary around a series of courtyards. This blending of light sources gives the space a soft luminosity.’
The budget for the project was ‘generous but not unlimited’, so Marinko used tilt-up concrete panels as his main building material. The panels contain two layers of insulation, which keep the temperature reasonably constant, and their appearance changes throughout the day as light moves across them. No rooms lie against the external concrete wall; instead it provides a circulation route around the house, as well as sixty linear metres of hanging space, which the Polls sometimes use for art exhibitions.
Lillian’s flat, though just metres from the main house, is oriented to maintain visual privacy, and Marinko has skilfully tempered the open courtyards and public areas with a canopy structure, used as a study, in the living room, and more enclosed bedrooms and bathrooms. This gives the house versatility – while it is robust enough to accommodate hundreds of visitors during an exhibition, and the many architecture students who come knocking on the door, it is also a comfortable family home.
‘The spaces I design are pretty simple,’ says Marinko. ‘The best architecture seems to have a compelling inevitability about it; you are never sure what to expect as you move through but once you arrive in a space everything looks like it’s meant to be there; there’s a subtle ease about it.’
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INFORMATION
- Website
- http://www.garymarinko.architecture.net.au
- Telephone
- +61.08.9445.9571
- Address
- Gary Marinko Architects 465 Scarborough Beach Road Osborne Park Western Australia Post office box 1616 Osborne Park wa 6916
