‘Living in this house was like a full-body experience’

Growing up in The Sydney Morning Herald’s most beautiful contemporary/modern home on the clifftop at Dover Heights was like living inside a painting that unveiled its beauty storm by storm, and day by day, said Alexandra Holman, a Sydney architect.

Designed by Australia’s 2026 gold medallion-winning architects Durbach Block Jaggers (DBJ), the family’s home was partly inspired by the Picasso painting, The Bathers, sunbaking on a similar coastline.

“When you have a house like that as ground zero, it really lifts the bar to what you think is possible within the realm of design,” said Holman, 36, whose interest in architecture emerged as she grew up in the award-winning home.

The three-bedroom home that Holman moved into with her family in 2004 when she was 12-years-old, was a clear winner among panellists and jurors of this masthead’s most beautiful homes project.

Nothing was as beautiful, or as Sydney as the curvaceous and eccentric home perched 70 metres above the ocean, with its dining room cantilevered over the rocks below, they said. It was quintessential Sydney, said jurors Tim Ross, Adam Haddow and Gabrielle Pelletier.

It responded to the sun, landscape and views, and showed Sydney sandstone in all its glory. Others who nominated the house said it blurred the lines between art and architecture.

“This house is so clever because it’s incredibly exposed as a site,” Haddow said. “You are sitting across the top of a cliff face over the Pacific Ocean, and yet it feels incredibly intimate and protected. It’s a very happy, warm, joyful house, and it feels like someone’s home,” he said when he visited.

“It doesn’t feel like a piece of architecture you can’t engage with. It does provide privacy, but it also lets you live in the outdoors.”

Far from sprawling, the home was precise in its framing of views and the scale provided space for a beautiful garden.

At a sold-out Sydney event to celebrate DBJ, the president of the NSW chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects Elizabeth Carpenter said no matter how small the project, the practice’s work was one of “architectural agility and curiosity, of place and reinvention, of collaboration and delight”.

From the curved Olympic Amenities buildings for Sydney Olympic Park, to the North Bondi Surf Life Saving Club, Holman House, the Phoenix Central Park and the Droga apartment (also among the list of most beautiful apartments), DBJ’s work was thought-provoking. It also had humour, joy and unexpected lightness, she said.

Sitting around the Holman’s dining table, the architects David Jaggers, Camilla Block and Neil Durbach reflected that the home had been a breakthrough for the then young practice.

“We didn’t know enough to be worried, but we knew enough to be able to do something. It was this thing of not being too scared, but being brave enough. Even now it feels adventurous,” Durbach said.

The architects initially suggested a large glass box on the site. Alex’s parents, Jennifer and Anthony, didn’t like the idea. And the architects are glad today that they said no.

Their willingness to listen to the client’s views was also one of the reasons they landed the contract. The home won the 2005 Wilkinson Award and positioned DBJ’s practice to land high-profile projects.

Holman said her mother Jennifer had been a big driving force on the project. As Grand Designs’ Kevin McCloud says often: Every great project needs great clients as much as great architects.

For Holman, the family home inspired her to study architecture.

“Living in the house was sometimes like a full-body experience,” she said. “Over the course of the day, you can see the glow of a sunrise transform to a dark cloud as a storm rolls in over the sea. I don’t think it is a house for everybody, but it is fantastic.”

Her joy in architecture sprang from her home; understanding the little touches like a low window so the family’s cat could watch the birds. From DBJ, she learned a “brilliant fizzing of art and history and poetry”.

Holman did work experience as a high school student with DBJ, and was later mentored and employed by the practice. She is now an architect and associate with Akin Atelier, with credits including the new resin bookshop in the Art Gallery of NSW’s new wing.

That inspired her to bring together “beautiful craftspeople” and incorporate things that are not traditional in architecture.

“Every day is an opportunity to imagine, experiment and play, that’s what gets me excited, and I think that 100 per cent comes from DBJ as that foundation.”

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