Architect at home: Carey Lyon

摘要

I am a little unusual in that I have never been commissioned to design a house, even one of those classic backyard extensions that most practices start with. So, I have never had to consider, as a designer, a professional conception of home. My experience is all bound up in working on my own home, where the concept is really just creating a place for our lives to be lived - an accumulation of life stages embedded into the fabric of the place. The original house itself is also a type of accretion made by interventions from many previous owners and changes of habitation. Originally built in the 1920s on the unstable and shonky reclaimed swamps of Elwood, it is slightly misshapen and collapsed, full of imperfections, where a spirit level will find no equilibrium on either the floors or walls. We have come to love those imperfections, as a kind of resistance to a perfect architect's home, and we find ourselves compelled to keep adding to them. We recently replaced the timber veneers on the kitchen cupboards and chose a standard Vic Ash veneer, but sought the seconds, the rejects, the unloved and insect ridden, the salon des refuses of the veneer industry, all ugly knots and poor grains. And we recently commissioned, for its slightly sloping floors, some new carpets with a cartographic swamp pattern so that the lost wetlands, Yaluklt Wilum Country, are always under our feet or on our minds. That makes us happy to be the keeper of the home's stories and secrets.