Visiting sites for gardens in Brisbane, we saw Stewie Vokes from Owen and Vokes through site fencing, pointing at one of their characteristic towers.
We popped in to have a look at one of their promontory rooms, which extends off one side of the Queenslander, stepping up from a brick base to edge a garden court. It has a great old Gehry house feel with its tower and reverse pitch roof. Inside it had a library at the point w raked seating to the view, which maybe was a tiny bit cluttered on the window wall. While the tower and it’s wall provide a dramatic structure and a sensible landscape logic I can still imagine it will just be lawn, and I am encouraged to ask them to treat plants more seriously. Stewie mentioned some ruined steps, part of their ongoing reverse archeology project.

For me, as it often is, it’s the serious treatment of the interior in a conceptual sense that impresses me w some architecture. OV work with the Queenslander in what would once have been described as an “uncanny” way: like a Russian doll or a Japanese tea house, the program space wraps around a dark empty centre, kitchen in the built in Varanda or sleep out. With its Scandinavian black painted timber (not liked by all) and the expressed vernacular structure external, now internal, there is a nice inside outside quality to the existing building. There is something odd to the Quuenslander house and Owen and Vokes are arguably the best at articulating it.