Bryan Dawe

Bryan Dawe brings the same dogged determination to living well as he does firing hard-hitting questions to John Clarke’s slippery politician on the 7.30 Report. The only difference is home life seems to come a lot easier to Bryan than Mr. Clarke’s hilariously obfuscating answers.

Bryan’s current residence, a renovated Victorian terrace east of St. Kilda, neatly compacts two centuries of western architecture into one, top-floor apartment. There’s the California feel of the timber staircase entry through the lush rear garden; a clean, well-lighted Australian contemporary kitchen and lounge (burlesque shots from his many photo exhibitions decorate the walls) and the classic French chateau-style outdoor dining setting. “I have no interest in living in a straight, what we would call, normal house,” Bryan says.

Bryan sounds surprised when he says he’s lived here for eighteen months. “This is quite a breakthrough for me. Apart from a period at Phillip Island where I lived for two and a half years this is the longest period I have ever spent in one establishment since I was fifteen. You know, friends stopped writing my address down in pen, they wrote it in pencil”.
 
“I used to write songs and I once got a letter from APRA, the Australian Performing Rights people, awarding me for the most address changes by a songwriter in Australia. Coming from songwriters who aren’t known for staying in the same spot all that much, this was quite a decoration.”

“It’s not that I haven’t wanted to settle down either, I’ve just never found the right place. To me my space and where I live is everything, so when I walked into this room I thought, this is it. That was on Saturday afternoon, and I owned it on Sunday! They had an auction and I broke every rule in the book. I didn’t get an Archi report. Christ knows what I bought, I dare think, I just knew I had to live here.”

Bryan shuffles between here and Phillip Island, but would eventually like to settle in one place and the house on Phillip Island seems most amenable to change. “I am now caught in a bit of a quandary. I couldn’t move from here back to Phillip Island because there wouldn’t be room,” he says.

Enter architect David Seeley. When Bryan bought the Phillip Island block back in 1989 for $22,000, David lived across the road in a stone and timber house designed by Alistair Knox. It was a house Bryan very much admired, so he took the next logical step and asked David to design him one. “Two reasons I decided to go with David: one was economics, David was a builder at this stage, aspiring to be an architect, this would be his first opportunity to draw up plans; and secondly, he was our neighbour, and if he did something wrong not only would he have to look at it, he’d have me whinging on his doorstep everyday.”

The result was a mudbrick house (inspired by Knox, largely known as the father of modern mudbrick) with an all-glass Florentine frontage. In the service of a formal entry, there was a charming pathway through the garden to a grapevine-covered pergola. The simple floorplan comprising one large open plan living area flooded with Northern light and a separate zone for sleeping, consisting of two bedrooms, a sewing room and a bathroom. David had met Bryan’s challenge and achieved it for under $70,000. That was nineteen years ago. Today Bryan has a new brief and it is as simple as the first one.

“I want somewhere stable for me, my art, other people’s art; a working studio that’s separate from the house that you can just walk out and close the door and leave it for part of the year. It’s got to have a lot of light and it’s got to be aesthetically pleasing, because that is where I will be spending most of my time.” (Bryan intends on spending a couple months of the year in Barcelona, Spain, too).

Bryan envisages a book-lined corridor connecting the existing house to a two-storey pavilion. “The downstairs will be a gallery to showcase art and the upstairs will be a large working space for two independent studios, one for me and the other for my partner Krista.”

“I would really like to see it made out of recycled everything. There’s no reason why it couldn’t be. Did I show you my bag? It’s made out of recycled tires. I bought it last night at Vic Markets.”

A few weeks later, David completes his scheme using the Archicentre Design Concept. He says the idea that generated the concept was a series of sticks joined together and sold in a shop in Geelong as an African Christmas Tree. “I was fascinated by the concept,” says David. “Its simplicity of form and stability.” The architect also notes being struck by British nuclear silos with a similar form that he saw while channel-surfing the other night, but thought Bryan wouldn’t appreciate this too much. “The new form is a nice counterpoint to the rectilinear qualities of the existing house.”

David suggests the curved skin part being made of laminated timber while the glazed ceiling would consist of a high-performance glass.

The architect replaces the sewing room/study with the new library enclosed inside a timber tunnel tapering towards an opening of double-height space: the studio gallery. “Bryan wanted a gallery space on the ground floor that was flexible and big enough to double as a photo studio.”

A simple staircase design leads to the new studio space. “Across the road, the houses sit on the foreshore, says the architect, “so from an elevated position you will have panoramic views of Churchill Island, and further South, undulating farmland.” 

— Shane Moritz