Habitus has published Sirius Residence, our Mosman home for ORO Australia, under the title “Carved from permanence.” It follows the Vogue Living feature on the same house, and Dakota Bennett has read it the way it was built.
Sirius was never a set of rooms with stone applied to them. The travertine and Taj Mahal quartzite carry through the kitchen, the living areas and the master retreat at a thickness that makes them architecture rather than surface, and that was decided early, before anything could be styled over it. Curved walls, layered ceiling heights and framed views do the rest, holding intimate moments inside generous volumes so the house reveals itself slowly rather than all at once.
Wellness at home has moved from indulgence to expectation, and what separates one retreat from another is whether it was planned or fitted in. Here the gym, sauna, steam room, ice bath and relaxation areas were drawn as a single sanctuary from the outset, held within the composition of the house rather than appended to it. Feature glass bricks filter daylight through the retreat, a sculptural moment that carries something of coastal Mosman inside.
“The wellness retreat was never considered an additional luxury,” says Maria Papadopoulos. “It was fundamental to how the home would be lived.”
That is the part worth taking from it, whatever you are building. A home does not become calm because calm was the brief. It becomes calm because a thousand decisions were made early, in the right order, by someone accountable for all of them.
Dakota goes further into the house than we have here, and Dave Wheeler’s photography of the retreat is the reason to go.
Read “Carved from permanence” on Habitus .
