Casa Mia House
Being the family home of architects Adrian Iredale of Iredale Pedersen Hook and his partner Caroline Di Costa, Casa Mia House was destined to impress. When the pair began designing and building their new abode in Perth’s covetable City Beach, they had a few ground rules; to minimise building waste, to use off-the-shelf components where possible, to ensure bricks were local, and perhaps most importantly, the home needed to be fun.
“You spend so much time inside your home, why wouldn’t you want it to be playful and why wouldn’t you want to have fun with it?” says Carolina.
With all this in mind, they set out to design a unique home that maximised their block without compromising on elements such as privacy. “The house needed to provide a presence and a façade outwardly, but then it also had to provide privacy, so quite early on we came up with the concept of the architectural mask,” Carolina explains of the statement-making brick façade that wraps around the corner block, embracing boundary lines.
“It’s working with a high-density form of living in a suburban environment and demonstrating how one can have that high density living, without sacrificing access to light, access to ventilation and privacy,” expresses Adrian. “City Beach was developed in the early 1960s for the Empire Games, so there’s a lot of early modernist homes in the area and we were very keen to demonstrate an alternative to the hard-line wall scenario of modernism,” he elaborates.
The dual-coloured wonder-wall ‘mask’ is made up of Indulgence Salted Praline and Metallix Carbide in Aspect format and soars beyond two storeys at its tallest, while nurturing a meaningful and practical connection to the neighbouring public park at its lowest point. Perforations and specific, strategic shaping guaranteed there was no compromise to ventilation or natural light. Adrian notes, “Traditionally, bricks can be used in a very standard way, and that was not what we were going to do from the beginning.”
“As much as we love the brick that comes from other parts of Australia, every brick in this house, making up these walls and floor surfaces, are local,” Adrian proudly declares. “It’s supporting local industry, pushing the extremities in many ways.”
Not only did the duo exclusively use locally-sourced bricks, they also reduced brick waste by avoiding brick cutting, which crafted a design feature in its own right. “The brickwork is really important to us, because it stitches together the entire special composition of the house. Every room has a fragment of that,” Adrian adds.
To maximise natural light within the entire home, Adrian and Carolina looked to ancient Japanese architecture for inspiration. “Perth is an incredibly bright place. One of our fundamental ways of increasing our sense of light was to work with fully glazed bricks around particular openings and that’s something we’ve learned through a lot of historic and ancient Japanese architecture,” says Adrian. “Moving deeper into the house, we start to use darker materials to reflect light and as the sun comes out, it’s filtered and manipulated and it’s been very specifically permitted in to the interior spaces in certain places.”
From the show-stopping kerb appeal to the intricate interior design, there’s no corner of this house that’s been taken for granted. “I am most proud of the liveability of the house and the way we have been able to introduce lots of different textures and materiality,” says Carolina. “The way that it all comes together to create a home at the end of the day, feels really good.”
“You spend so much time inside your home, why wouldn’t you want it to be playful and why wouldn’t you want to have fun with it?”
“You spend so much time inside your home, why wouldn’t you want it to be playful and why wouldn’t you want to have fun with it?”
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