Artist Lynne Eastaway chats comfortably the day we visit at her Glenorie house with its architect, Glenn Murcutt AO. We are meeting at a crossroads in her life and her career, and this house has been instrumental to both.
Sequestered away on a bushland site on the north-western outskirts of Sydney, where sprawling suburbia meets once-prime pastoral land, the Ball-Eastaway House was completed in 1983 and won the Wilkinson Award for residential architecture the following year. It was designed for Lynne and her then-partner (and lifetime friend), the pioneering Australian abstract painter Sydney Ball.
When their relationship began, he had been her art teacher, she his shy protégée. A charismatic figure in the art world, he’d grown disillusioned and wanted to spend less time teaching in the city, more time painting in solitude. Their search for a suitable studio space led them to this 10-hectare bush block in Glenorie. With it came the dream of an alternative lifestyle with space enough to live together, collaborate and hold court with other artists.
They would visit and camp on site for many seasons before commissioning a young Glenn Murcutt, whose star was rising after a handful of seminal projects signalled him as a new – and distinctly Australian – voice in architecture. These included the Laurie Short House (1972–73) in Terrey Hills, winner of the 1979 Wilkinson Award, followed by houses in Kempsey (Marie Short House, 1974–75), Jamberoo (Fredericks House, 1981–82) and Bingie Bingie (Magney House, 1982–84). In time, these houses would define a philosophy of “touching the earth lightly,” with an ecological approach that centres humanity within nature, not above it.
This philosophy comes from a place of deep listening. When he first visited the Glenorie site, Glenn walked in its dry sclerophyll forest for hours, Lynne tells me, observing its pink angophoras and yellow bloodwoods, the banksia and geebung, the broom-heath and wattle, noting the size of the largest leaf down to the smallest. He studied, too, the topographic contours of the land, and the lichen-clad sandstone ledges that corralled rainwater into rivulets and a nearby creek.
“Syd understood architecture,” Lynne says. Sydney had worked as an architectural draftsman early in his career, and knew he wanted something special for this site. A mutual friend, architect/landscape architect Bill Ashton, introduced the couple to Glenn, and the Glenorie House project was born.
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The artists purchased two agricultural nursery sheds of corrugated steel that they planted in proximity to one another as painting studios, a short meander from the house site, which Glenn had selected fairly quickly as a broad, gently sloping ledge of sandstone.
“The rock shelf was the most suitable building site as it was already clear of trees, so we didn’t have to remove any, and the rock itself provides a safety zone against fire,” says Glenn, who takes each project as an opportunity to explore a sometimes-singular idea. In this case, he says: “The house is very much about fire and water.”
A simple orthogonal structure clad in corrugated steel is cantilevered into the bush with a curved roof and glazed at either end. Inside are two bedrooms, living and dining areas open to the bush, a kitchen and bathroom skylit from above, and hardwood floors throughout. The whole structure is elevated on slender steel columns drilled into the bedrock, allowing rainwater to continue flowing across the site, unimpeded by the modest presence of the house.
At the time of construction, bushfire building regulations were, Glenn says, “non-existent,” but over the decades, this house has survived several major bushfires. Higher up the block, the art studios form a pivotal defence, collecting rainwater to feed the sprinkler system on the house and storing surplus for the fire brigades to tap into, keeping the house wet in case of fire.
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Apart from a tight budget, the main client stipulation was that the house serve as both a home and gallery, a requirement that shaped its floor plan. Off the gravel driveway, a raised timber boardwalk leads to double glass doors, where entry brings you face to face with a signature Sydney Ball painting, several metres wide. It hangs on a long corridor wall that separates bedrooms to the south-west from living areas to the north-east. Other paintings and artefacts adorn the walls, the long white curved ceiling funnelling light around them. Each room offers a framed view of the landscape. “That’s called ‘prospect,” Glenn explains. “But you also need ‘refuge.’”
For this, he designed one of the home’s two verandahs – a contemplative space enclosed on three sides under the curved roof, and open only to the bush. Unseen from inside, it is a solitary space, purposefully introspective.
“It’s designed as a meditation space,” says Glenn. “When the awards jury visited, the chair told me it was the most serene space he’d ever been in.”
The second verandah, connected to the dining and living rooms, is a more social space, projecting into the bush under the curved roof overhang.
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Lynne and Sydney separated two years after moving into the house but remained friends, continuing to spend time painting here, sometimes together, often not.
Following Sydney’s death in 2017, Lynne has been preparing the house for sale, spending time here painting, packing up the art studios and overseeing a renewal of the house, for which she commissioned Downie North, who have carried out essential repairs and restoration.
Catherine Downie and Daniel North founded their practice in 2015, working largely on residential projects, with great sensitivity to both people and place. For continuity, they reached out to Glenn, who was happy to be included.
“Glenn’s work, his method of practice and his way of seeing this country has enormously influenced our own practice,” says Catherine. “He has been so generous with his time, and granted us access to the Murcutt Archive at the State Library of New South Wales. Our conversations with him, plus archival documents, allowed us to investigate the process by which the house was originally designed, which opened up the method by which to approach the restorations and alterations.”
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As most architects know, it helps to have a client who gives a clear brief and the creative license to achieve it. “I wanted to get rid of the bath and toilet and repair a few things around the place … But I didn’t want to interfere with the sense of the house, and they haven’t,” says Lynne.
The bathroom renewal matches the original tiling format, and adds a new circular wash basin and finely detailed cabinets that match the kitchen joinery profiles. Much of Downie North’s other work – replacing worn timbers, repairing aluminium shutters, renewing plumbing systems – is undetectable, so careful have they been.
“To have been entrusted with the restoration, and contributing to the story of this house, has been a privilege for us professionally and personally. It’s a small project, but the process of discussion, drawing and design has been incredibly rewarding for us,” Daniel says.
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For Lynne, it’s a bittersweet time: packing up the house, with all its memories, while finding a new affinity in this familiar landscape. She has come to love this place so much that she recently formalised arrangements for most of the acreage to be preserved in perpetuity as habitat sanctuary, to ensure the legacy of the house and its special environment.
For Glenn, revisiting the house after 40 years is sheer delight. “It holds up very well! It’s a tough little house, but it’s also gentle. And the sensitive interventions by Catherine and Daniel have improved it, without taking anything away. That’s very easy to get wrong you know, and they haven’t. I think it’s a better building now.”