Highlife

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Highlife

APR/MAY 2014
TM®

*The all new A 200 BE

Country Life in thE S o u t h e r n H i g h l a n d s o f AU S TRA L IA

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APRIL/MAY 2014
MEET bestselling author
TERRY HAYES
ISSN 1326-8783

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a CREATIVE FAMILY
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why everyone loves maples
The
family A father, mother, daughter, son and son-in-law combined forces to
build a modern, eco-friendly home in Mittagong – and the results
surpassed all their expectations, writes DEBORAH McINTOSH

home P H OTO G R A P H S TO N Y S H E F F I E L D

72 H I G H L I F E M AG A Z I N E .CO M . A U
H I G H L I F E M AG A Z I N E .CO M . A U 73
t here can’t be many houses built with the
family involvement of the Amy Leenders designed
house in Mittagong. Amy designed it with her husband
Hugo Cottier for her parents, Ben and Catherine
Leenders. Ben, a retired broadcasting engineer, project
managed the build, doing much of the work himself.
Son Luke helped him install all the cabinetry and the
staircase, and made a striking pendant light. And
when the house was complete, it turned out Ben
was just warming up, so he and Catherine got to work on the
furniture and artwork.
As we sit at the steel and laminate dining table, discussing
the project, Amy mentions that it was made by her father. Then she
points to the coffee table, the entertainment unit and even the
artwork above it. Catherine and Ben wanted something to improve
the acoustics, and came up with a piece based on hexagons.
Catherine chose the colours, and Ben cut and routed the pieces and
built a frame for them to hang on. “Each hexagon hangs separately,
so you could take them down and change the colour arrangement,”
says Ben, who brings an engineer’s brain to everything he touches.
The modern, clean-lined house is unlike any home the couple
has owned before, but they quickly adjusted to the white, open-plan
space. The living room, with its double-height ceiling, has become
their favourite part and they now find traditional homes a little
dark and closed in. “I don’t know what is so appealing about the
high ceiling, but I love looking up and seeing the sky through that
window,” says Ben.
“Sitting here, you can follow that gum tree to its full height ABOVE the double-height living room features a double-height window
(through one tall narrow window),” says Catherine. “That’s something for viewing a prominent gum tree. catherine and ben made the artwork and

you can’t do in most houses.” ben made the entertainment unit and coffee table.BELOW amy, ben, luke
For Amy, seeing her parents enjoy the home has been a personal and catherine leenders. OPPOSITE PAGE the exterior has three
joy and a professional gift. Unlike a typical project, she can see surfaces “to break up the mass of the house”: brick, painted fibre

exactly how her clients use the spaces over time and which aspects cement panels and corrugated iron.

74 H I G H L I F E M AG A Z I N E .CO M . A U
[ ]
what makes this house special
n The double-height living room
n Thoughtfully placed windows
n Reverse brick veneer
n Furniture and artwork made by the owners
n An over-sized sliding door for flexible space

H I G H L I F E M AG A Z I N E .CO M . A U 75
 work best, particularly environmental ones. “Dad, who’s a bit of
a geek, has been analysing all the data and keeping a record of how
this house performs. He looks at outside and inside temperatures
in summer and winter, and it’s been performing so well.”
“It is better than we expected – no offence,” says Catherine,
laughing with her daughter. “I used to hate it if it got too hot, I
couldn’t cope with cooking. But here, if you take your shoes off, the
floor is cool. When it got to 41C in summer, the highest it got inside
was 25C.”
“I actually wish we’d built in more sensing devices,” says Ben.
Amy, 35, believes the seeds of her interest in architecture were
sown when she was a child and her parents built a house in
Wollongong. “Dad was the owner builder and he did it in the
evenings and on weekends, so I spent a lot of time at ‘the block’
watching that process.”
Her parents later lived in Canberra, and then in Italy for six
years, where Ben project managed the broadcast engineering side
of a new Sky Television building. When the couple returned to
Australia, they decided to retire to the Highlands, where Catherine
had lived when she was 10 to 21. “I met Catherine when she was
in Holland, and the first place I came to in Australia was Bowral,”
says Ben. “We married in Bowral, but had to move away for work.”
The couple bought a 1400 square metre battleaxe block in
Mittagong in 2009, and got their daughter down from Sydney to
give her a brief. “It was one of dad’s drawings, basically a floor plan
with the number of rooms,” says Amy, laughing with her father.
But she has so much admiration for what he did once she presented
him with a design.
“My husband’s also an architect, so together we did a design
and eventually a development application, but that was basically
our role. Dad taught himself all the CAD (computer aided design)
programs and did all the construction documentation – in the
end it was like a mini lesson in architecture for him.
“In terms of the building process I think it was seamless.
Things do go wrong on building sites, but dad was on top of the
whole thing. And each time my husband and I came for a visit,
it was the cleanest site we’d ever been on!”
“I always cleaned up before they came,” laughs Ben. The build
took 18 months, from May 2010 to November 2011, and Ben and
Catherine were very lucky to be able to rent the house in front,
so Ben could constantly be on the site.
The two-storey house was designed around environmental
principles and fortunately has a northern aspect, which makes
it easier to control the amount of sun entering the house (low
winter sun comes in, high summer sun stays out). It was built using
reverse masonry, which is the opposite of Australia’s traditional
brick veneer (brick on the outside, a cavity, and a stud wall on
the inside).
“It doesn’t suit our climate,” says Amy, “so we swapped it around,
with brick on the inside, a cavity, then a stud frame and weatherproof
cladding. It’s the brick that really heats up and stores heat, so in
this case the fibre cement cladding protects the brick from summer
sun. In winter, any heat produced from the underfloor heating or
from the sun coming in is stored in the brick.”
“Quite often I wondered if it was going to work,” says Ben, “but
I would never build a conventional brick veneer home again. It’s
such a comfortable environment to live in.”
“I try to push reverse brick veneer with a lot of my projects
but there’s a slightly higher upfront cost,” says Amy. “The argument
is, you pay a bit more when you’re constructing, but the payback
in your utility bills happens in a very short period.”
The house is built on a concrete slab (for thermal mass), and
has hydronic underfloor heating downstairs and European radiators
upstairs. The exterior has three surfaces to visually break up the
mass of the house – a brick garage, painted fibre cement panels
and corrugated iron.

76 H I G H L I F E M AG A Z I N E .CO M . A U
 ABOVE a mirrored splashback brings nature and light into the kitchen, which has a butler’s pantry tucked behind it. BELOW a light by new zealand-based
designer david trubridge; a guitar stand made by luke; ben made a set of cupboards featuring mitred doors (and, like other cupboards in the house, no

handles). OPPOSITE PAGE the deck at the front of the house; the modern spotted gum staircase; composite wood sunshades on the northern side.

Many of the windows are long and unconventionally placed,

but a lot of thought has gone into every one. “The windows frame
a view, instead of being a hole in a wall,” says Amy. “One thing I
think looks daggy is to have a square room with a window in the
centre of the wall. It’s so much more interesting to place them,
so when you’re sitting at the desk you have a long window looking
out, or you accentuate a tree, or you have a low one looking on
to the garden.” All the windows and doors are aluminium (for low
maintenance) and double glazed. The doors are tall, at 2.4 metres.
The living space is mostly downstairs, with the living room,
dining table, kitchen, butler’s pantry, laundry and bathroom,
plus a large workshop and the garage. “The plan is that when we get
too old to go upstairs, we can convert the workshop into a bedroom
and live downstairs,” says Ben. His daughter is sceptical. “I’m not
sure you’d be able to part with your workshop, even at 85,” she says.
His recent pride and joy is a CNC router (a computerised numerical
control machine) that he built himself. “You basically draw something,
send it through the software and the computer controls the
router bit,” he explains. He used it for the hexagonal artwork,
with the pieces based on shapes Catherine uses for quilting.
The couple took their time decorating the house, with Amy
under strict rules to keep quiet. “Architects have a reputation for
trying to control everything,” she says. “But with all my projects,
how can I say, ‘I don’t like that couch colour or the design’? At
the end of the day, it’s their house, they need to feel comfortable,
and that’s how you get happy clients.”
“We had furniture from the ’90s, the ’80s, since we were married,”
says Catherine. “We moved it all in, and eventually thought, we’ll
have to change it.
“But I had to live in the space for a while first because I’d never
lived in something like this before. We had an open-plan house in

H I G H L I F E M AG A Z I N E .CO M . A U 77
 CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT the owners didn’t want a lawnmower for the small patch in the front so opted for synthetic lawn
(their extensive vegie garden is in the bush backyard); ben made a wide sliding door for the sewing room so it can open to the rest
of the house or be closed off as a guest bedroom; ben at work on his cnc router.
Canberra, but not this. I had to sit and think, and I’d look across
at the old dining table or the dark walnut unit and they just didn’t
suit the house. Then Ben said he was keen to make things.”
Ben, his son Luke, and son-in-law Hugo, had already installed
all the cabinetry in the kitchen and throughout the house (Luke
is an industrial designer/furniture designer). Ben ordered all the
joinery and had it delivered in flat packs.
All the finishes are spare – there are virtually no handles –
and Ben took the same tack with his furniture. Amy found a
Scandinavian white laminated birch multi-ply and he used it
for the dining table, coffee table and entertainment unit. He also
built cupboards with mitred doors, copying them from ones he
saw in Holland. An ugly pine hall table was retro fitted and
spray-painted white.
Ben also built two desks – one upstairs for himself and one
downstairs for Catherine, a small practical office space near the
kitchen. “Mum can be cooking and emailing, or often I’ll talk to
her by Skype while she cooks,” says Amy, who lives in Erskineville
with Hugo and two young children.
Ben and Catherine chose a mirrored splashback for the kitchen,
which brings more light into the room and acts as another
window (if you sit at the dining table facing the kitchen, you are
still able to see bush and sky).
Upstairs is a second sitting room, Ben’s office space and
three bedrooms, one of which doubles as Catherine’s sewing room.
This room continues the home’s open-plan feel by having a two-
metre wide door which remains open unless guests come to stay.
“We got a quote for a stainless steel bracket and dad couldn’t
believe it was $2000,” says Amy. “Being dad, he decided to make
78 H I G H L I F E M AG A Z I N E .CO M . A U
it instead. He got rollerblade wheels for about $20, spent $60 on
the bracket, joined two doors together – and then mum and dad
had fun painting it. It was about a $1500 saving.”
The house is painted white but some colour, particularly red,
is added via elements including the sliding door, sofas, cushions
and odd decorative item. Most of the knick-knacks gathered over
a lifetime are in a cupboard in the garage. “I haven’t put much out.
They just don’t suit the house,” says Catherine. “Having been in
Italy for six years and then selling Canberra, we shed a lot of
stuff.” Anything new must fit the house, like the David Trubridge
light Amy and Hugo gave as a house-warming present.
For Amy, the house has satisfied every goal she sets herself
as an architect. “I think architecture should be affordable to
everyone. There’s an idea that architect-designed houses cost
more, but that comes down to the finishes and door handles.
Making spaces shouldn’t be expensive. It’s not going to cost a lot
more, but it’s going to add so much to your quality of life.”
Her parents’ home cost around $500,000, although labour
costs were significantly less because her father and brother did
so much.
“The family component of it was so fantastic during the build.
And now, when my family comes and stays, and my brother and
his partner, the house works so well and we all enjoy it.
“I think it’s amazing what dad has done, and I loved how his
architectural education developed along the way. He really gets
it now – the thought that goes into architecture. He understands
how clean lines help spaces. And mum and dad love being here.
How does an architect know they’ve done a good job? By having
happy clients.” n HL