Modern homes blend in with the environment, come with ingenious solutions to heating and cooling the rooms, and offering the inhabitants everything they need. The SL House in Australia proves that several times over.
Located in Aranda, a suburb of Canberra, the house needed to fit in with the characteristics of the location where you can find mature Eucalypts and Acacias as street trees and lots of other plants.
One of the things the architects from Ben Walker Architects sought to do was to create an internal living environment that perfectly embraces the views offered by the area the house is built on. Therefore, the kitchen, the living, and dining spaces have views of the surrounding trees and hillsides.
The house features a lot of thin vertical apertures but also large, broad picture windows. The outside of the house is covered in steel and hardwood to better enhance the idea that there’s a desire to blend in with nature.
The SL house also includes northern windows to provide passive heat gain in the window. At the same time, the windows include eaves or hoods to control heat gain during the scorching Australian summers. The walls are also built specifically for these jobs as they feature internal lining, stud frame, membrane, batten/air zone, plywood, membrane, and cladding. The floors and ceilings are also heavily insulated, and the windows feature high-performance glass to reduce thermal transfers from exterior to interior.
The house features a wonderful kitchen that mixes in black and rich wood colors. The ceiling of the kitchen comes in two levels, with windows inlaid between them, in order to allow even more light in.
The living room also comes with a wonderful feature where the wall retracts to allow access to the deck and the garden. The bedrooms also open up to the garden.
Photographs: Ben Guthrie
