Watkins Residence, Adelaide, Australia

Apart from its Arts Festival, Adelaide is lesser known for its patronage of progressive architecture. It’s a difficult profession at the best of times. Good clients are almost everything and always in short supply, which is why Chris Watkins leapt at the chance to design his own house on the verdant slopes of Mount Osmond. To add to the complexity of the project, planning regulations threatened to stonewall the building application with an unassailable cliff face.

Designed for his young family, the house has a flexible floor plan. But the winning pitch, not surprisingly, is the floor to ceiling glazing on the north elevation that takes in the tableaux of grassy slopes and beyond to the sea. Room dividers are vast sheets of Pilkington Optilam™ I Translucent White 10.4 with a translucent white interlayer that retract into wall cavities, eliminating stone walls and creating a feeling of more space. Undressed concrete walls provide a raw, muscular edge consistent with the expressed steel sections below.

From a glazing viewpoint, Watkins sought substantial technical advice from Pilkington. For architects and clients alike Pilkington Activ™ has been a revelation
as external window cleaning can be risky, labour intensive and expensive.

Maximising on natural light, the house incorporates glazing on the east and south
elevations to introduce controlled light into the bathroom and kitchen at floor level.
Watkins views the house as a continuation of his love affair with the open plan, informal living space of Modernism. Natural light is a great informer and in this respect, an environmental consideration too.