Process
Our buildings emerge from a rich and ongoing dialogue with our clients. The design process is personal, inclusive, and collaborative.
“Eoghan’s easy-going collaborative approach and his ability to come up with creative and cost-effective solutions to the myriad problems which inevitably arise when renovating a century-old building made the whole experience an exciting and enjoyable one. I would not hesitate to recommend Eoghan Lewis Architects to anyone seeking a truly creative, environmentally sensitive and ecologically smart design team.”
The Beginning
Most projects begin in a similar way.
A brief often arrives in the form of a list—rooms, budgets, constraints. This is perfectly normal. As we get to know more about our clients, what they value and what success for them might look like, the brief becomes more nuanced and in turn, the questions we ask become sharper. Expectations are aligned. Some clients don’t want the romance, they just want the project delivered under a set of very clear equations. Bringing the romance to an unromantic project is one of our biggest challenges.
The design process is as much iterative interrogation as it is a search for solutions.
Trust
At the beginning of a project, we ask for a degree of trust and openness from our clients.
We don’t ascribe to a particular style or set of ready-made solutions which disappoints many. What we bring to each project is our experience and an intense curiosity—about our clients, their project, the site. Not much is clear at the beginning, and not every path leads somewhere useful. Many ideas lead to dead ends while others may open up delightful new possibilities. It’s exhilarating and frightening at the same time for us and also for our clients!
As projects develop and parameters emerge, design directions are interrogated and discussed before we move forwards. The process is linear. Well, kind of.
Start with the Garden
Rather than landscape being a tack-on or after thought , we prioritise gardens and consider them as if they were rooms—outdoor rooms.
Designing the house around garden spaces gives adjacent rooms the opportunity to bring nature in. This allows the architecture to reduce, to simplify and be calm. And when we say nature, we don’t just mean leaves and rocks and trees, we mean any place that sunlight is invited into or wind blows or any place where leaves can fall. On a tight city block a beautifully framed piece of sky may be all we can bring into the building, but this can also be considered a kind of garden threshold.
Relationships
Developing efficient relationships is key. Between inside and outside. Between one room and another. Between light and shadow. Between old and new. Between a building and the street.
We pay particular attention to thresholds—those moments where conditions shift. A step, a door, a change in material, a line of shade. The places where private becomes public, where wet becomes dry. Those moments in a building where the outside is invited in. These are often the places where buildings are most felt.
You will notice that we often layer up our window and door thresholds with screens that can be operated independently. Glazing keeps the outside outside. A second skin might have a flyscreen and batten screen that responds to summer sun or a privacy issue. Richard Leplastrier taught us that ‘live’, as in ‘to live’, is a verb. It describes an action or state of being. It is not static. We like that our buildings are ‘worn’ and can be adjusted to particular conditions, needs or whim.
Garden House Marrickville is informed by context, landscape and topography. The roof is a wild, native garden set out at the upper floor level. Additions cascade down the site, each level informed by topography, each living space opening directly onto new garden spaces. The building steps back to the southern boundary maximising winter sun penetration and focusing attention on a verdant garden - imagined as a kind of family square or piazza. The natural pool is filtered by aquatic plants.
“The house encourages you to sit and contemplate, to be still and connect to the land. It invites you to that serene, calm place when you forget about the outside world.. it’s heaven for us.”
Performance
We care deeply about how buildings perform: how they respond to summer and winter sun, how they catch a key breeze, how they hold warmth, how they weather over time, how they breathe. Our aim is simple—to make buildings that are comfortable year-round, weather slowly and beautifully with minimal reliance on active heating or cooling.
These ideas are fleshed out in Sustainability.
Simplicity
Building is complicated. Councils, construction costs, existing building idiosyncrasies, topography, underground services, a big tree in the wrong place, noisy neighbours.
Every project presents itself as a unique puzzle that needs to be cracked and if we do our job well, we resolve complexity with thoughtful, restrained solutions. Simplicity has aesthetic and practical consequences, like fewer materials, simpler construction, logical forms and better value for our clients. It means simple systems, straight forward and effective communication with our clients, authorities and builders. And it means buildings that are more direct, uncompromising and easier to build. Simple ideas done well.
Another way of thinking about simplicity architecturally is clarity. We want our buildings to be easily understood. We want them to work in harmony with their surroundings. We want our buildings to confidently know where they are and what they are. The clothes have to fit!
Public: Eco Prefab
“The key to the project was its simplicity. Eoghan responded to our Brief in a direct and assertive way so the building took shape very quickly and captured the imagination of key stakeholders, decision makers and authorities”
A small hardwood and corrugated iron addition stitched onto a 19thC sandstone cottage.
House: Tempe
Materiality and Craft
We’re interested in the stuff of architecture. What our buildings are made from and how they’re put together.
We’re often drawn to humble, locally sourced materials such as hardwood and hardwood plywood, raw bronze, clay bricks or limewash paint. The most important question for us is which materials can do each task the best and how do they perform over time. We try to understand the unique qualities of those materials, work with those qualities, and consider how they all come together in a beautiful way.
Timber for example, is warm and tactile, but asks to be handled with care - particularly when exposed to the weather. Steel brings an altogether different set of qualities to the table. Steel loves paint for obvious reason, particularly near the coast, whereas raw copper and brass oxidise very slowly, becoming more beautiful over time. We like to work with materials on their own terms and delight in the practical and poetic qualities they bring to a project.
We enjoy playing materials against one another. The warmth of timber contrasts beautifully with the coolness of concrete or steel. The considered roughness of recycled bricks and mortar against the silky smoothness of concrete and timber. In this way materials are considered to be members of a family, each with their own specific attributes, personalities and roles. And like members of a family, don’t we want each member to shine and express themselves in an authentic way, enjoy the work they are doing and age beautifully over time?
More on the performance and sustainable dimension of materials here.
Generosity
We like to think about what buildings give, not just what they take. This is the noble dimension of architecture.
A building can contribute to its street. It can engage its neighbours. It can create moments of openness, of shade, of invitation. It can respond carefully to its site and use resources mindfully and with restraint.
Generosity is not about excess. It is about intention.
Enjoyment
The process should be enjoyable. Exhilarating even.
There are moments of pressure, of course, but when the work is approached with care and with joy, it turns out well. We enjoy what we do, and we want our clients to enjoy the process too.
There is a particular kind of excitement in seeing ideas take shape—especially when it becomes something no one expected at the beginning.
“Eoghan Lewis Architects has masterfully maximised the opportunities embodied in a series of site constraints and used these to raise the ambition of the project.
This is a project of civic distinction appropriate to its place delivered with a great degree of care and thought, creating a rich, warm, and highly appropriate public architecture.”