❉Dialogue
❋Design
49 Walsh Street by Neometro
49 Walsh Street does not announce itself. In the Domain Precinct, where the Royal Botanic Gardens press their canopy against the back fences of Victorian terraces, and the Tan runs past in an unhurried loop, that restraint reads as its own kind of confidence. The building occupies its site the way a well-dressed person occupies a room: without trying, and entirely.
Neometro's most significant project to date was crafted in collaboration with Italian architecture firm MORQ, whose co-founder, Andrea Quagliola, was educated in Rome, a city whose built history has a way of calibrating one's sense of what endures. That education is legible throughout Walsh Street. The architecture draws on the same first principles that made classical buildings worth returning to: the relationship between form and light, geometry and emotion, shelter and the world beyond its threshold.
Now open for private inspection, the Display Apartment offers a rare opportunity to experience the project in full material resolution. This is not a show-home dressed for optimism. It is a home styled for living, and the distinction is immediately felt.
Dining area opening through full-height doors, 49 Walsh Street.
Step inside and the first thing you register is the quality of the making, the hush of full-height doors, the bleached timber joinery that lines entire walls, the hand-troweled render developed specifically for these homes in collaboration with MORQ. The surface is neither smooth nor rough, somewhere in between, and it catches the light differently at every hour. The joinery wall, a generous, pale expanse punctuated by a dark slat-screen cornice, anchors the living space with authority that never tips into heaviness.
On the lower shelf, a group of cylindrical forms in chocolate, stone and gold cluster like a conversation mid-sentence. Leaning beside them is Morgan Stokes' ‘Painting Concerning Existence,’ its layered paper surface scored into something resembling geological time, made tactile. Stokes works at the intersection of painting and object-making, and his work has the elusive capacity to hold its own in an interior without competing with the surrounding notes.
Standing quite sentinel at the edge of the dining space is Hugh McCarthy' ‘Cadence,’ a tall, slender timber column with the gravity of a standing stone. McCarthy's pieces occupy that rarer register beyond the decorative and the functional; they are things that think. Cadence earns its name: its verticality draws the eye upward and gently slows the room around it. That his work appears here feels like confirmation of something the Australian design community already knows: that work coming out of independent studios in this country operates at an international level.
Living room at 49 Walsh Street.
The B&B Italia TUFTY-TIME sofa sits low and generous at the centre of the living room, its tufted upholstery in warm brown, the kind of thing you sink into and stay. Across from it, the OKAY armchair by Adriano Piazzesi for Joe Blow Studio crouches in black leather, sculptural and unapologetic. A pair of Viabizzuno Semprepronti side tables orbit the seating on thin steel profiles, doing almost nothing and contributing everything. Noguchi's Akari 25N glows in the corner. Christine Johnson's ‘The Site - A Still Place’ from the Artbank collection unfolds in amber and ochre on the opposite wall, its landscape not quite recognisable, not quite abstract, the kind of painting that takes time and rewards the time taken to soak it in.
Artwork by Christine Johnson.
The kitchen is where the architecture most fully reveals its European conviction. The island reads as a single resolved object: bleached oak, stone-white benchtop, a bookmatched marble splashback whose veining runs calm and continuous. Pink hydrangeas and trailing maple branches fill Hattie Molloy's IXIA Vase on the counter. A Tolomeo lamp by Artemide leans over the surface with the angular intelligence of a draughtsman. The bedroom, by contrast, is the apartment's quietest argument, almost nothing, and yet everything is placed exactly right. Rosanna Ceravolo's Portal Mirror leans against the wall, its fluted silver frame both sculptural and functional, a mirror that reads as an artwork until you catch yourself in it.
Open plan kitchen and dining at 49 Walsh Street.
What no render could have communicated is the weight of the doors, the grain of the timber, the way the slat screen filters and circulates air through its fine vertical ribbons. These are the things that distinguish architecture from building, and this, emphatically, is the former.
Outdoor terrace at 49 Walsh Street.
Private inspections are available by appointment through Neometro.
Styling by Kirilly Barnett and Chloe Walton of Neometro. Art sourced through Artbank and Curatorial + Co. Furniture supplied by Space Furniture, Made by Morgen, Cult Furniture, Viabizzuno, In Good Company, Joe Blow Studio, Studio Ceravolo, Stylecraft, Hattie Molloy, Oigall Projects and Armadillo. Photography by Tom Ross.
