Holman House, Dover Heights

Holman House, in Dover Heights, New South Wales, Australia was completed in 2004 to a design by architectural firm Durbach Block Jaggers. The firm is located in Potts Point, Sydney, Australia, and is a small architectural practice who specialise in residential and public space designs. The house was the winner of the Wilkinson Award in 2005.SiteDover Heights, one of Sydney’s most affluent suburbs, is mainly residential. One side of the street is an ordinary walk but on the east side these regular houses become extraordinary due to their panoramic views over the Pacific Ocean.Holman House is sited on the edge of a cliff on the edge of Dover Heights, providing a view across the ocean. The house cantilevers 6 m from this edge and at its furthest corner one is over the sea.Durbach explains: “We thought we will probably never have a site like this again. It was an opportunity to do something significant”.ConceptDurbach and Block liked the idea of being able to look up and down the coast from many vantage points in the house, but to get to that point, designing the house became an adventure that completely took over their lives “but in a good way”.Tension within the design process arose when it took almost six months before they established a form for the house. Eventually Durbach stumbled across, ‘The Bathers’ (1918) by Pablo Picasso, which became design inspiration. For context, from 1918 on, Picasso spent his summers by the sea, which led to a series of works with bathers. The Bathers possesses fluid forms and demonstrates a sense of freedom and what Durbach describes as “elastic connections to the perimeters".