Beside Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens sits Silhouette House by Powell & Glenn, a delicate piece of modernist architecture reimagined with care and restraint. Working within complex heritage constraints, the design team wove together sculpted forms, natural materials and considered spatial planning to create a home that balances the old and the new, the outside with the inside.
At the intersection of the urban and natural world, Silhouette House by Powell & Glenn sits beside Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens in South Yarra. Described as a house that can “find expression in fine, sculpted forms that embrace the site’s angularity,” the striking home is deeply informed by its natural surroundings. “The angular block has a natural advantage of being quite disorientating,” architect Ed Glenn says. “Light hits different walls at different angles and you get these interesting oblique views that create a more unusual spatial experience.”
This light is noticed immediately as from the entry, the home unfolds towards this northern light. You walk through the front door, and from the threshold of the entrance you can see glimpses of gardens and the pool. “At every different point there is a sense of looking along at different gardens from different angles” Ed says. “When you have walked through to the end of the house, you feel as though you have been transported somewhere else.” As for the external palette, it is quiet and timeless, sitting respectfully alongside the old outline of the home, softened over time by lush gardens designed in collaboration with Myles Baldwin Design.
Given there is quite a lot happening spatially, Powell & Glenn kept the internal walls as a fairly serene white, rather than trying to introduce more materials.
The kitchen features CDK Stone Calacatta honed marble, Grazia&Co Diiva Swivel stools, Gaggenau 400 Series oven, Combi-Steam oven, and induction cooktop.
When you have walked through to the end of the house, you feel as though you have been transported somewhere else.
Once governed by a complex set of building permits and heritage regulations, Powell & Glenn thrived in the face of these challenges, alongside a visionary new owner who sought to revive the home’s original character after years of idleness. In collaboration with heritage consultant Roger Beeson, the team carefully removed and stored the home’s original bricks, later reinstating them with precision.
“This is such a delicate little jewellery box,” Ed reflects. “We had to be very thoughtful about how we attached to it, both from a heritage perspective and a design perspective, as we did not want to overwhelm it.” Additions were handled with restraint: “We used natural materials that would patinate, so over time you would maintain the crisp white outside and original architecture while the surrounds were slowly absorbed into the garden.”
In contrast to Melbourne’s more typical orthogonal blocks Ed suggests the, “the floorplan was the biggest challenge but greatest strength of the site”. As so many Melbourne blocks are built on the original grid, the angularity of the home becomes its own asset, and the graeden works around it allowing for infinite green spaces.
The Edra Standard sofa and Escea DS1150 fireplace in the living area.
That interplay between raw and refined textures continues inside. “Given there is quite a lot happening spatially, we kept a lot of the internal walls as a fairly serene white, rather than trying to introduce more materials,” Ed explains. Timber joinery introduces warmth and tactility, while marble and textured render bring structure and rhythm. The kitchen, located at the centre of the plan, acts “like an elbow to the house,” says Ed. “We’ve used that device and the spaces immediately adjacent to it, to disguise the awkward angles you often get in a house built on an irregular block.”
The home’s compact rooms were also remade to better suit contemporary life, “without destroying the DNA of the building,” Ed explains. Light was also a major consideration, particularly in the powder room and kitchen, where natural illumination now reaches deep into the space. A textured render fireplace subtly divides living and dining spaces, where crisp walls offer a gallery-like backdrop for the client’s art collection.
The result is a spatially intriguing, emotionally layered home that continues to evolve. In Ed’s words what’s left is a “combination of poetic spaces, offering an interesting play of transition and repose”. It is a home constantly in conversation with its gardens and history, offering an uplifting, layered setting that allows its story to continue changing over time.
Light hits different walls at different angles and you get these interesting oblique views that create a more unusual spatial experience.
The primary en suite is clad in CDK Stone Bianco Carrara marble.
Powell & Glenn were thoughtful in how they attached to the original building, both from a heritage perspective and a design perspective.
The angular block has a natural advantage of being quite disorientating.
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