Federal, New South Wales, Australia

Designed by Edition Office, Federal House is both hard and soft located on a sloping remote Australian landscape in New South Wales.

The existential experience of inhabiting this ancient landscape is acknowledged through the confidence of the building as a discrete object, announcing “I am here.” 

However, the quiet and elegant form is the first mediation between inside and outside: the apparent solidity of the object is deconstructed by fine-grain timber battens.

The interior experience of this house might have been a neatly contained but detached experience of one’s surroundings. 

Instead, the interior establishes a layered connection to the place and between overlapping activities. 

This is achieved using a deep veranda-like space that converts the hallway into a covered outdoor room, a type used similarly in colonial homestead buildings and, more acutely, in Asian architectures as layered and sheltering threshold spaces. 

The section anchors the house to the site in the lower-ground spaces and has a reciprocal anchoring effect on the user, controlled through interiority and human scale. 

Literally grounding the project is a sheltered black-concrete subterranean pool, linked to a planted void at the heart of the home. 

From the entry above, this void allows glimpses through ferns to the still body of water beneath. 

Federal House recovers the calmness of shade and shadow where only certain textures become available, such as the silver patina of the crown of the wood grain.

Project: Federal House
Architects: Edition Office
Client: Private
Photographers: Ben Hosking