design
mag |
45
Can experience at the “big end of town”
inform a suburban build?
In a long and distinguished career, Nigel Fitton
has worked with such architectural leading lights
as Sir Terry Farrell, Peter Corrigan,ARM and Nonda
Katsalidis. His projects have included London’s
MI6 headquarters, Frankfurt Airport, RMIT’s Storey
Hall, and the Republic and Eureka Towers.
He is now a principal and design director of
Spowers, one of Australia’s oldest architecture firms,
a specialist in large commercial projects in
Australia and overseas.
We caught up with Fitton just before he left for the
Venice Architecture Biennale. Surprisingly, he has
had little exposure to small-scale residential
architecture. However he brought his commercial
skills to bear on this, his third family home, saying
that the experience was “amusing in its way
because it condenses all the large stuff into a
small box!”
It certainly isn’t a small house, but neither is it a
mansion, Mc or otherwise.The Fitton house is a
practical, space-efficient four-bedroom family
home that is stylish and hard wearing and built to
meet a budget. It sits on a long, narrow site next to
their previous home, about a kilometre from the
beaches of Port Phillip Bay.“It has a fairly industrial
kind of aesthetic, an off-the-tool kind of look,” Fitton
observes.
The internal layout is simple.The ground floor is
primarily given over to an open plan lounge,
dining area and kitchen, as well as a cloak room.
To the rear is a 25 square metre studio/workshop,
the domain of Annette Fitton, an industrial
designer and architectural model maker “now
emerging from the fug of fulltime motherhood”, for
her developing business making fine furniture and
handcrafts.
THE
TRICKLE DOWN
EFFECT
