In actualising the urban retreat, the Split Home combines contextual materials, adaptive functionality and sculptural form to offer a tactile yet intimate experience of dwelling. A brief informed by the client’s desire to escape, retreat, work and play amongst an iconically “bayside” setting, has shaped a unique dwelling typology meticulously crafted by Seidler Group and Golden.
The journey to this new realm begins as your decent beneath a hovering fragment of the upper floor enclosing passage into the home. Logically, the ground plane offers endless variation of programme and pause framed by apertures of light and landscape. Operable glass walls blur the delineation of interior, seamlessly dissolving into the homes weathered timber shell upon request. An intrinsic yet robust shell of concrete composed of precisely selected reclaimed timbers contain a kitchen. Living, dining, rumpus and den meticulously arranged by Seidler and intimately detailed by Golden.
Enticed by a fragmented glimpse of the oasis of nature above, the ritual of vertical passage occurs via a light filled void of floating stone and French oak timbers transporting you to a new landscape of self-sufficient resting pods arranged amongst an elevated dune of coastal vegetation, a retreat from the active ground plane below. Four self-sufficient bedrooms suites featuring individual sun decks sheltered amongst coastal foliage are individually cocooned by charred, aged and articulated textures, an ode to the iconic beach box.
The morphology of a coastal split inspired an organic master suite projecting unconventionally towards the south to allow light to flood the pool deck below and draw breezes into the inner realms of the upper courtyard. This unique trajectory and poetic form transcend the façade to compliment a hotel-like interior by golden. A fractured aluminium skin decayed by a metaphoric and literal sea of perforations, a beacon of the home illuminated the in both natural and artificial light.
