A new seven bedroom residence on a generous site in Balgowlah Heights. The project has been designed as a multi-generational home with a long-term view. Sustainability initiatives include solar-powered geothermal heating and cooling, combined with a robust low-carbon concrete structure, low maintenance integrated materials, and passive solar design principles.
The new Allan Border Oval Pavilion will form a vital part of this sporting and community destination in the heart of Mosman. Archer Office was engaged following a competitive public tender process and has been working closely with Mosman Council and multiple stakeholders since early 2017.
Initial studies for Council involved a detailed analysis of functional requirements and an evaluation of the existing facility to determine an appropriate direction for the project. A series of options were explored, ranging from adaptive reuse to a new build.
The new building consolidates multiple requirements into a single, shared community facility that addresses both the traditional built context and the technical requirements for a contemporary sporting venue.
The project received planning approval in September 2019.
A finely crafted timber-clad addition to a traditional semi-detached home. The design responds to the constraints of the narrow site by taking every opportunity to expand each room to the outdoors. An unexpected courtyard balcony is created by expanding the master bedroom into the existing roof form. The staircase punches up to create a window to the sky in the centre of the plan. The edge of the living room is pushed out to the fence to utilise the full width of the site.
Year: 2016
Location: Bronte, NSW
Photography: Peter Bennetts
Awards:
Shortlist, Houses Awards, Alterations and Additions, 2017
Shortlist, Australian Institute of Architects NSW Chapter, Residential Alterations and Additions, 2017
Archer Office have been working with Waverley Council since 2018 as lead consultant for the adaptive reuse of The Boot Factory, a heritage listed building located in the heart of Bondi Junction.
The project will create a new community and innovation hub within the old Boot Factory building, upgraded public domain spaces and improved links to adjacent Council facilities.
A new five bedroom residence overlooking the harbour in Fairlight. The design responds to the terrain and aspect with terraces allowing each of the three levels to open onto the garden. The roof opens towards the North over a combined living area that extends from the garden and out towards the view.
This fit-out for Endeavour Drinks Group creates a new multipurpose events space for 500 staff within a heritage-listed building in Surry Hills that was originally designed for Readers Digest. The project makes explicit the idea of the interior fit-out as distinct and separable from the architecture, in recognition of the fact that tenants and functions will change over time. Previous additions were removed and the heritage brickwork was carefully restored. A lightweight, tensioned cotton cord lining is then introduced to wrap the heritage interior, ‘monumentalising’ the architecture by emphasising its volumetric features, while lightening the whole space, improving acoustics and screening first floor office windows. This permeable veil allows views through to the heritage brickwork and detailing, and provides partial concealment of services such as air conditioning, lighting, alarms and sprinklers, while allowing them to operate through it.
Year: 2016
Location: Surry Hills, NSW
Photography: Peter Bennetts, Kasia Werstak
Awards:
Winner, Workplace Design Award (National), Australian Interior Design Awards, 2017
Winner, Best of State Commercial (NSW), Australian Interior Design Awards, 2017
Commendation, Heritage Adaptation, Australian Institute of Architects NSW Chapter, 2017
Commendation, Interior Architecture, Australian Institute of Architects NSW Chapter, 2017
Archer Office is engaged by Waverley Council as the Lead Consultant for the Edmund St Social Housing project in Queens Park. The project is to provide long term affordable housing specifically for elderly residents, and will be the first new build of its type for the Client, Waverley Council.
The design exceeds the baseline requirements of the applicable SEPP (Affordable Rental Housing), through reference to the Livability Housing Design Guidelines and NDIS Specialist Disability Accommodation Design Standards published by Livable Housing Australia.
The scheme includes five apartments, with a naturally ventilated central circulation with lift and open stairs rising to a rooftop communal entertaining area. The finely detailed concrete and exposed brick structure is robust and hard wearing, with integral finishes providing an honest expression of construction and quality, while reducing ongoing maintenance.
The project is scheduled to start Construction in late 2023, with the first occupants due to be welcomed in early 2025.
The Campfire Table forms a simple venue for democratic meetings, by referencing a timeless human gathering ritual.
The base is made using a single length of solid timber, cut into three equal lengths. A simple geometric joint allows the three identical elements to pack flat and assemble without additional fixings.
The Campfire Table has been recognised with several awards including The Edge Commercial Design Award at The Australian International Furniture Fair and an Australian DesignMark in 2005.
The Campfire Table is held in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
Designed: Tomek Archer, 2002
Awards: Australian Designmark, Australian International Design Awards 2005.
Exhibition: Permanent State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia, 2009.
Produced by: Roethlisberger Kollection, Switzerland for Europe and North America.
Available in: Australia through Anibou, Designfarm and Innerspace and in New Zealand through Thonet NZ.
This adaptive reuse project completely transforms a pair of outdated buildings to create a restaurant and entertainment precinct with a series of protected courtyards.
Rather than demolish and rebuild new, a solution is proposed that with minimal material investment delivers both additional lettable area and improved amenity through the introduction of lightweight, operable pavilion structures and integrated landscaping to improve air quality and moderate temperatures.
The existing Piazza is encrusted with ornamental elements and plastic enclosed outdoor dining spaces that attempt to protect from winds that rush through the long and open-ended outdoor space. The proposal starts by simplifying the buildings to their essential tectonic forms.
A series of lightweight dining pavilions with operable roofs are introduced, spanning between pedestrian colonnades on either side of the courtyard. Between these pavilions, a series of intimate, protected courtyards gardens are created, each with their own qualities and character.
This warehouse conversion creates a flexible three bedroom residence within the raw concrete shell of a 100 year old car assembly factory. The space was stripped back to reveal the original concrete structure. A finely crafted steel frame is then inserted to support a series of flexible rooms, with movable glazed partitions opening onto a central shared double height space.
Year: 2016-2018
Location: Sydney
Photography: Kasia Werstak
Awards:
Winner, Good Design GOLD Award, Architecture & Interior Design, Good Design Awards 2020
Archer Office, in collaboration with DKO Architects, were announced in November 2019 as the winners of a City of Sydney Design Excellence Competition for this challenging site in Glebe, shared by the State Heritage-listed Bidura House.
The scheme consists of 68 dwellings including terraces and apartments, as well as the restoration of Bidura House to return it to use as a single residence.
The Development Application is currently under assessment by Council.
A home for a family who enjoy living amongst their accumulated objects that have been collected over time.
Rather than hide everything away, a system of open shelving provides a perimeter framework to be filled with the various utilitarian and nostalgic paraphernalia that accompanies each room.
These shelves wrap through the section to form the structure that supports floor and roof.
Year: 2017 -
Location: Tempe, NSW
A pair of pavilions commissioned by Lend Lease following a competitive tender process to be constructed in the centre of Darling Square, an exciting new precinct being constructed on the site of the former Entertainment Centre in Sydney. The project has been developed in collaboration with Kengo Kuma and Associates, who are the architects of the adjacent market hall and library building, and landscape architects Aspect Studios.
Year: 2015 -
Client : Lend Lease
Location: Haymarket, NSW
Remodelling of an existing brick house to create a set of interconnected living areas on the ground floor that open to the garden beyond, with a private second storey addition opening onto its own elevated garden.
The existing pitched roof and eaves are removed to reveal the orthogonal brick shell of the house. A new first floor addition is installed as an elongated box that opens onto a new roof garden along the entire northern side. A bedroom is placed at each end to capture views of the harbour skyline to the west, and Bondi Beach to the south. A central void creates a light-filled living room in the centre of the house. The expressed steel structure on the western elevation frames the opening to the garden and ties old and new elements together, while capturing operable blinds and awnings to moderate the afternoon sun.
Year: 2016
Location: North Bondi, NSW
Archer Office developed the design of this apartment building containing 24 apartments located on Bourke St, Waterloo as part of a competition scheme for a larger development lead by by Woods Bagot Architects.
The scheme maximises the relationship between living areas and the outdoors. The form of the building has been driven by exceptional site constraints, with the solution providing for efficiently planned apartments opening onto generous balconies from all living areas. A series of two storey terrace-like dwellings are accessible directly from ground level.
The building features integrated ESD initiatives including passive solar design principles, integrated, resilient finishes, solar panels, and rainwater collection for on site irrigation of planting.
Poly is an interior pavilion commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, following an invited competition process. Conceived as a collective pavilion, it is both one and many. The pavilion is made up of a series of protective but outward-looking hooded structures that can each be moved to create an ever-changing social formation for various events and activities.
Poly: Tomahawk // Archer Breakspear, 2014
Commissioned by: Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney 2014
Photography: Brett Boardman, Kasia Werstak
A mixed-use scheme comprising eighty six apartments and ground floor retail.
The apartments are planned as a slender continuous band that wraps around three open air cores. This strategy delivers an efficient plan with cross ventilation and access to sunlight for every apartment.
Year: 2017 -
Client : Podia
Location: Arncliffe, NSW
A stacked duplex is converted into a single residence within the existing two-storey double-brick envelope. A series of careful cuts to the walls, floor and roof create a continuous ow of spaces from the entry and garden, up a stairwell filled with light from a large skylight above to the living areas on the upper floor, which look out over the landscape. Each of the seven new openings in the building are treated differently. An expansive clear opening to the rear garden is created by replacing the existing bi-folding timber framing with a single piece of glass that slides out of view on an external steel track. A finely crafted steel staircase winds up through a spacious opening in the floor. A skylight over this void spills light throughout the house. Over the kitchen bench a large fixed glass window brings the nearby trees into the room, while a small square winding casement window over the stove draws fresh air. Finally, the original sunroom has been fitted with a series of mechanical steel pivot windows that dramatically open the corner of the room to the valley of Manly, Sydney Harbour and the Pacific Ocean.
Completed as Archer Breakspear by Tomek Archer and Toby Breakspear
Year: 2013
Location: Manly, NSW
Photography: Peter Bennetts
A new restaurant and entertainment precinct that inverts the prevailing internalised shopping mall experience, instead referencing the vernacular wrap around verandah to create an inhabited threshold between 2000m2 of internal retail space and a north-facing public square.
Documentation for tender is currently underway.
Year: 2016 -
Client : QIC
Location: Melton, Victoria
Masterplan and Concept Design for the final stage of QIC’s flagship Castle Towers redevelopment at Castle Hill, in Sydney’s North-West.
Zone 4 is a place for the community and comprises an arts hub, urban farm, and a park above a carpark with active edges including a car showroom and events venues.
Fundamental to the approach is the adaptive reuse of existing structures on the site, and the celebration of a required carpark to create an intensive and integrated series of places that share infrastructure while operating at various and complimentary times of the day and week.
The combination of programs is intended to generate symbiotic relationships between commercial retail activating public space, and vice versa.
A comprehensive masterplan for the front of house areas for Belvoir St Theatre, including the public foyers, box office, bars and street frontage. The project rationalises and expands catering facilities from the main foyer into other front of house areas to improve amenity and activate the street frontage, while opening up the main foyer for extended programming uses. A large permanent awning and signage upgrades to the street frontage reinvigorate the identity and public presence of the building, opening the activities of the theatre to the street and local community.
Completed as Archer Breakspear by Tomek Archer and Toby Breakspear
Year: 2013-
Location: Surry Hills, NSW
Conceived as auxiliary accommodation for an existing holiday house, these prefabricated cabins are an extra bedroom or studio space, without bathroom or kitchen, enabling simple relocation around the site over time.
The structure is conceived as a movable “window”, a habitable threshold that allows different relationships with the surroundings. The different size and nature of its openings (front, sides and top) and the relocation possibilities make the cabin a relational device able to support an ever-changing experience of views, sounds, activities and climate of the site.
The cabins are prefabricated to completion at a factory in Sydney, before being transported to site. The design has been developed closely with the engineers to allow a reversible installation that does not require any permanent foundations that would be left behind when the cabin is moved.
Year: 2016
Location: South Coast, NSW
This pavilion for the courtyard of the IVY on George St in central Sydney was commissioned as a new, central undercover area to become the best seats in the house for watching Pacha performances on Saturday evenings.
The intervention is conceived as a device “to see and to be seen”. Wrapping around the existing staircase with a set of thin structural ribs and a transparent roof, it maintains crossed sight lines through it and becomes visible from all sides and from above.
It also allows programmatic transformation, becoming at other times a permanent stage for the venue.
The structure was prefabricated in the factory and installed on site over two days. The construction is reversible: completely freestanding, it doesn’t require any attachments to the existing building.
Year: 2015
Location: The Ivy, NSW
An exciting new fresh food precinct for Taylors Lakes in Victoria, containing a mix of fresh food retailers and market style dining experiences.
The project creates a diversity of experiences beneath a shared canopy that blurs the lines between indoors and outdoors.
A series of retail pavilions are set within an overarching trellis canopy that ties the project together and extends into the landscape to bring the outdoors into the project.
The mall spaces between pavilions are naturally ventilated, and feature a transparent roof that allows extensive planting to grow throughout the space.
Due for completion in March 2020.