Crafting a seamless, award-winning home in Sydney’s Middle Harbour enclave.

The home in Seaforth presented a unique opportunity to construct a spectacular home in Sydney's middle harbour. This multi-award winning building platform sits well below the road with an unusually great width facing the harbour. The architects designed the wave-like roof as the ‘main facade’ and point of interest which in turn emulates the rolling hills of the local topography.

Our construction challenge was to suspend the large expanse of roof on as few supports as possible allowing for the view as well as the inside-outside transitions to be as absolutely seamless as possible. To that end, the roof’s structural system was designed as a ‘Glu lam’ and steel three dimensional space frame using curved elements in a multi directional fashion.

The Roof “Space Frame “ as it were, was in turn held up by an off form concrete ring beam with fixed clearstory glazing between the two. It was enormously difficult construct a minimally proportioned off form concrete ring beam with minimum cover on the re enforcement and prevent both cracking and deflection under load.

We consider this roof to be an art work equivalent to a modern day vaulted “cathedral” with highly complex geometrical timber joints, which in many instances required numerous plywood templates to ascertain resolution. The overall seemingly simplicity of the roof belies the care taken even in the smallest of micro details including for example the welding of roof membrane joints, direction and spacing and location of storm water outlets not seen and concealed. All steel facias were custom made to curved template dimensions.

The bespoke construction quality of this building does not stop at the roof with large oversized imported glazing elements sliding flush on internal / external thresholds, four meter off form post-tensioned cantilevered balconies and even down to bespoke artisan built custom door handles. As builders we were also asked to coordinate and sequence state of the art heating/cooling technology with some seven 80 meter and 100mm diameter deep bore holes into the earth around the building as part of a complex geothermal heat exchange system.

We believe we have delivered an exceptional quality build for a futuristic and yet beautifully handcrafted home on the edges of Sydney’s middle harbour foreshore enclaves. This was recognised in the project not only being nominated for, but also winning, both the HIA and MBA Building Awards in 2019. We would like to thank not only our ever-valued clients, but also our project team, for their effort and dedication to such a beautiful build.