1976 THE COLLINS HOUSE / IAN COLLINS

‘THE BUILDING PROCESS WAS LONG AND DRAWN OUT BECAUSE NO BUILDER WANTED TO UNDERTAKE THE PROJECT, AND SO EVERY WEEKEND POSSIBLE I WAS HELPED BY FRIENDS: AN ORTHODONTIST, THE BOAT-BUILDER AND A BIOCHEMIST.’

This large picture window is a single piece of glass which was positioned with a great deal of difficulty, given the slope of the site.

A bank of white cabinets separates the dining area from the kitchen. The monochromatic colour scheme and bold choices of mainly Italian furniture make a confident design statement. The Seventies marble table is by Italian architect Mangiarotti and creates a sculptural centrepiece in the open-plan room.

There is no mistaking the collins house. Sited above the ferry stop in Sydney’s Mosman Bay, it is a light white modernist beacon in a sea of traditional Federation terracotta and brick. From a distance it is easy to see the outline of the house’s simple form and the graphic ship's hatch windows, but the material with which it is constructed is not evident until close up: the shell of the Collins House is made entirely of fibreglass.

Ian and Rosanne Collins, both architects, have lived there for more than 30 years and recall with clarity the process of finding the land, designing the house and building a home for themselves and their two daughters. ‘It was Rosanne who first saw the site in 1968, and was smart enough to realise it wasn’t big enough for developers to build a block of flats,’ says Ian Collins. The site is small, steep and awkward, but its enviable location and outlook encouraged the Collins to buy it, realising that with two architects in the family, a building solution wouldn’t be too hard to find.

‘Initially we submitted a plan just to get council approval for a building on the site,’ says Collins. At that stage the idea was for a brick and timber house with a degree of structural complexity. Although council passed the plan, Collins began to rethink his design and conversations with a friend, structural engineer Alex Osborne, persuaded him to move towards ‘the biggest rectangle I could build on the site’. At the time the Collins purchased the land, a cream-coloured apartment block was scheduled to be built close by, and a neighbour had a modern garage, which freed Collins from any sense of obligation to conform to a Federation context.

‘I was looking at the work of American architect Richard Meier and admired his use of inter-penetrating volumes. I didn’t want to do a Meier-style house but he did open my eyes to new possibilities,’ says Collins. Two other forces were at play – one negative and one positive. On the negative side was Collins’ experience with the bricklaying trade. ‘I was working in the Department of Public Works, alongside Ken Woolley and Peter Hall, and later my job was to supervise various projects. We went through a period of problems with bricks and bricklayers and I thought if I could be spared the need for that particular trade, it would be an advantage.’

At the same time, Collins’ passion for sailing brought him into contact with a yacht builder who constructed Olympic-class boats. He had the capacity to mould large-scale fibreglass panels, large enough, in fact, to be used to build a house.

There were two mould shapes: a flat piece 1.5 metres wide by 3 metres high, and another forming the corner panels. The process was slow as the boat-builder, Phillip Maloney, could only produce one or two panels a week. ‘We’d put them on the roof of our Ford station wagon and bring them one at a time from Lane Cove to Mosman,’ recalls Rosanne. They were stacked onsite, waiting for the weekend workers to hang them in place. ‘The building process was long and drawn out because no builder wanted to undertake the project, and so every weekend possible I was helped by friends: an orthodontist, the boat-builder and a biochemist,’ says Collins. ‘We would hook the panels in place, fixing them to the roof, as a proper curtain wall might.’

While fibreglass may be considered a lightweight material for house construction, there was nothing insubstantial about the core structure itself. The sandstone bedrock was locked in place by rock bolts, and three thick concrete slabs were supported by sealed tubular steel columns. ‘The firm of structural engineers Taylor Thomson Whitting oversaw the building and one of its principals, Dick Taylor, who had a boat moored at Mosman Bay, would call in regularly and check how we were doing.’

One of the defining features of the house are the lozenge-shaped windows which, again, reference boating. On the living level, the windows are like pairs of ship’s hatches, made by inserting a shaped piece of pineboard in the standard fibreglass mould to create the window frame. ‘The reason this shape is used in boats is that the seal is strongest without corners, so these windows are frameless and seal with a neoprene gasket.’ The most impressive window is the wall of glass with rounded edges at the northerly end of the living area. ‘I had designed it as five glass panels with fine mullions, but when the glazier saw it he said that for the same price he could provide one large piece,’ says Collins Adds Rosanne: ‘It took half a dozen men to carry it down the slope.’

While upstairs the view is chanced upon through pairs of windows, downstairs in the bedroom/bathroom level, it is completely embraced. ‘We used a window system recommended by another sailing friend, the architect Richard Leplastrier. It’s a sliding system of floor-to-ceiling glass opening up to the terrace. Richard also recommended the Vola taps in the bathrooms.’ As the long side of the house faces west, it does get hot, and one of the original devices for cooling was to pool water on the concrete roof, designed with an upstand for the purpose.

Curves recur throughout the house and the circular staircase between the levels is set in a white concave stairwell. The stair treads have been filled with fibreglass which has gained a patina over the years, giving it the appearance of tortoiseshell.

Right from the outset there was a different vision for the interior design of each level of the house. The living/dining/ kitchen area was tiled in black, and the original wall treatment was of ply panels covered in black felt. ‘I recall reading a book from Anthony Powell’s 12-volume A Dance to the Music of Time. There was a description of a party in a room which was totally black, and the faces appeared to float…the idea stayed with me,’ says Collins. ‘The interior lining panels were pinned to the wall so that the black felt surface could soon be replaced but it stayed, and we used the panels as a pin board as well as a background for artworks.’

Downstairs was light and bright, with white ceramic floor tiles laid in the bedrooms and continuing out onto the terrace linking the two spaces. The girls’ room with its white laminate cupboards and white walls was originally decorated with primary red furniture and bedspreads. ‘If you look at the floorplan of the building, it doesn’t read like a normal house. It is hard to tell where areas begin and leave off.’ This is particularly true of the bedroom level, where the children’s room was partitioned by a row of Artemide bookshelves rather than a traditional stud wall. Hence the house had the ability to evolve as family circumstances altered.

Decoratively, the interior made a strong statement – the Collins started collecting quality furniture in 1964 when they bought the Eames table and chairs for their first marital home in Greenwich. The open-plan living area, with its monochromatic palette, showcased many classic furniture pieces from the Sixties and early Seventies. These include the Anfibio sofa-bed, which was designed by Alessandro Becchi in about 1971 for the Italian company Giovanetti; the Caori coffee table, from around 1962, by Vico Magistretti; lights by Artemide and Flos, and the magnificent black marble Eros dining table, designed by an Italian architect, Angelo Mangiarotti, in about 1971.

‘We have copies of Domus magazine from 1958,’ says Rosanne. ‘It was a fantastic inspiration to us.’ In fact, Collins is the first to admit that the sweeping curve of the stainless steel on the kitchen benches was influenced by an article he saw in it. ‘My mother had stainless steel kitchen benchtops in her cottage, so I knew the properties of the material and that it worked well, but the design inspiration came from a feature on a Mangiarotti kitchen in Domus,’ he says.

Storage was considered right from the outset. Floor-to-ceiling cupboards run the length of the retaining wall on the lower level. ‘There is even a space at one point

The galley kitchen combines white cabinetry with curved stainless steel benchtops. Open on both sides, with a view to the water, the kitchen is part of the main living area, but hidden from view by tall cabinets so as to not interfere with the clean lines of the overall space.

The signature windows, which recall ship’s hatches, are placed in pairs along the north-west facing façade.

The view into the master bedroom.

The entire bedroom floor has large sliding glass doors which open onto a generous terrace. Situated between the bedrooms are twin bathrooms, also all in white.

where you can walk through the cupboard into a “secret passage”,’ says Rosanne. Storage was something close to their hearts as, for many years, Rosanne ran a shop selling imported Elfa storage systems, which they have in their own home, along with modular furniture and Marimekko fabrics.

The Collins House is a one-off. While the nature of its design and materials delivered fast construction, marketing the concept was not something Collins considered. ‘The fibreglass was not cheap, because it was for this use only. In addition we had some costly excavation which is normal in this area. The house probably ended up costing the same as a brick equivalent,’ says Collins. Rosanne, an architect in her own right, acknowledges the house was her husband’s creation. ‘You see,’ she explains. ‘I was the client.’

DETAILS THE COLLINS HOUSE

KITCHEN SURFACES Domus magazine was a tremendous source of ideas for Rosanne and Ian Collins, and in a 1974 issue they found a kitchen designed by Italian architect Angelo Mangiarotti which provided the inspiration for their kitchen. (They also had a dining table designed by Mangiarotti, so felt in tune with his aesthetic.) In the open-plan space, the kitchen forms a galley running horizontal to the dining and living areas, with a high bench used for display separating the zones. The kitchen itself is constructed in white laminate with stainless steel shaped to follow the curves of the cabinetry, creating a simple, sculptural effect. The durability of the materials has ensured that the kitchen is still in very good condition.

EXTERIOR FIBREGLASS Building a fibreglass modern home in an area of predominantly Federation houses did cause the local council some concern. While there were no domestic precedents, there was a new office building under construction in North Sydney for Sabemo, an Italian company. The façade of this building was made up of large square glass floor-to-ceiling windows set into solid sculptural frames in bright orange fibreglass. When Mosman Council asked for a sample of the material, Collins provided one from Sabemo, in bright orange… the relief of the council upon discovering it was actually to be constructed in white fibreglass probably gave the building application an increased chance of success.

COFFEE TABLE The Caori coffee table was designed by Vico Magistretti for Gavina in 1962. It is fabricated in gloss painted timber, in either black or white, and is topped with a sheet of aluminium with pull-out drawers at either end, and a ‘pop-up’ storage compartment in the centre for LP records or magazines. The two sides are hinged, dropping down for access to recessed storage spaces. Magistretti, who died in 2006 at the age of 85, was particularly famous for his groundbreaking work in plastics during the Sixties. The Selene (1969) and Gaudi (1970) chairs, and the Chimera light (1969), all for Artemide, were particularly celebrated.

BEDROOM The house has a light, fine sense of construction achieved by the use of fibreglass sheeting. Given that the block is small, valuable space was saved by not using brick, which would have further reduced the internal volume. The living/dining/kitchen area is at street level and the concept for the house was always to give this level a more enclosed feel with smaller windows and water glimpses, while the lower, bedroom level would be white and bright and entirely open to the view. The window system downstairs allowed for the floor-to-ceiling glass doors to open up completely to the balcony. This space was originally divided by Artemide bookshelves to create bedrooms for the Collins’ two daughters. The northern window looks out onto dense greenery which provides privacy.

WINDOWS The house is characterised by the lozenge-shaped windows and doors which fall into two types of construction. The front door and the big north-facing window have frames manufactured by Plasteel. While the profiles of these frames are plastic, structural strength within the frame comes from galvanised rectangular steel tubing. This system allowed for easy fabrication of the rounded corners. The frameless glass windows use the formed recess in the fibreglass panels as framing. These windows were made of tempered glass to suit the hinges and catches available, and were fixed into the fibreglass panels before the fibreglass was lifted into position. Although one window shattered during the lifting operation, it was easily replaced.

PLASTIC SEATING This moulded plastic chair is by Svante Schoblom for Overman, a Swedish company specialising in plastic furniture based in Tranas, Sweden. The glossy plastic moulded seat is fixed to a chrome-plated sled base. The design shows a strong similarity to the Modus chair by Works Design and the Polyprop chair by Robin Day. Schoblom designed several chairs in plastic for Overman and patented designs for radical plastic flat-pack furniture in the late Seventies. The shiny black chair fits well with the monochromatic aesthetic of the Collins House. The dining table is black marble with white veining and is surrounded by Plia dining chairs in clear Perspex and chrome by Giancarlo Piretti.