Set behind an almost windowless white brick face on a laneway in Malvern East, Melbourne, B.E. Architecture turns its director's family house inward around a cobbled forecourt and a run of courtyards.
Casa Piva belongs to Andrew Piva, a director at B.E. Architecture, who set out to build a home for his own family in Malvern East, a leafy pocket of Melbourne. Designing for yourself removes the usual client, and the studio treated that freedom as a reason to look inward. The household's Italian heritage became the organising idea, carried less through ornament than through weight, texture and the memory of older buildings. As B.E. writes, “The brief turned inward, considering how spaces could nourish and support his family’s rituals and ways of living.”
From the laneway, a modest door gives no clue to what lies behind it. Pass through and the first space is a walled forecourt paved in granite cobblestone, where trees climb through an opening cut in the roof above. A single arch draws the visitor out of the forecourt and into a run of compressed, low-lit rooms that stage the entry before any living space appears. The plan withholds, then releases.
The palette stays tight: brick, timber and travertine, surfaces B.E. calls “strangely reminiscent of an older time and place.” Rough-sawn travertine runs underfoot through the kitchen and living areas, the rusticated brick of the exterior continues inside, and the joinery is cut so each piece reads as its own object, its grain running one way here and another there to set up deliberate variation. In a handful of rooms the timber takes over completely. The kitchen, the study and the master ensuite are lined floor to ceiling in antique oak, storage and fittings folded into the walls.
The plan follows how the family cooks and eats. The kitchen is the first sign of warmth after the entry, and it sits with the dining area yet is held apart from the living room so that noise stays where it belongs. A passion for cooking built a pizza oven and barbecue into the brick of one of the courtyards, extending meals outdoors. The study, meanwhile, drops below the floor on a short flight of steps, its tall bookshelves wrapping the room into a cocoon. Beyond the kitchen a second and larger courtyard opens up, a sheltered garden that draws daylight into the main living spaces.
Against the solidity of the rooms, the studio layered in softer things gathered over time. An oversized plaster ring hung with birds casts light across the living room, and nearby Perspex tables hold books in the open; both were made to order rather than bought in. A sofa wears vintage Missoni fabric. Rising under a skylight, the softly detailed stair leads up to the private rooms and carries daylight back down into the entry below. The references threaded through the house, drawn from different places and periods, stay deliberately submerged, there for anyone who cares to read them and invisible to anyone who does not.
