From community-minded housing in Canberra to an architect’s lauded own home in Sydney’s north, these are the homes we featured in our Revisited series in 2024.
Nestled into the hillside above Wategos Beach in Byron Bay, the home Christine Vadasz designed for her young family in 1977 was a testing ground for a holistic approach to environmental design. Almost 50 years after it was completed, it endures as an unpretentious example of architecture in equilibrium with landscape.
This fresh and functional house was one of a flurry of modernist beach houses built on South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula during the boom of the 1960s. It endures today not just as a nostalgic reminder of the optimism and vibrancy of the era, but also as a testament to the hedonism of slow and simple holidays at the beach.
In the town of Murrumbateman, north of Canberra, this home epitomises architect Laurie Virr’s deep understanding of the human need for connection to place. Today, it is a reminder of Virr’s belief in the restorative potential of a well-designed house.
This Sydney house, designed by Peter Johnson for his own family, has been admired and acclaimed since its completion in 1963. Honest, unpretentious and wonderfully preserved, it endures today as an important work of Australian residential architecture.
Conceived in the 1950s as an exercise in minimalist living for an architect’s elderly parents, the diamond-shaped Caldwell House in the Melbourne suburb of Heathmont later proved itself startlingly adaptable as a home for the architect, his wife and their three children. It has remained a cherished family residence for seven subsequent decades.
In the 1970s, Michael Dysart’s design for Wybalena Grove explored medium-density, community-minded housing as a welcome alternative to single dwellings. Fifty years on, its lasting popularity suggests how cooperative models might readily address present-day problems of housing affordability, social isolation and the need to live more sustainably.
