RAMSDEN

Ramsden is a family home assembled from fragments of memory.

When I was in my late twenties, I read a book that helped clarify my understanding of the world and my place within it. It has been central to my practice ever since. W.G. Sebald’s reflective travelogue The Rings of Saturn, a book with no real plot, yet densely layered with histories both personal and international, near and distant, revealed the complexity and disorder inherent in our personal relationships to both history and culture and our own pasts.

It helped me understand why I obsessed over music like Fennesz’s Venice, where small fragments of melody, field recordings and waves of noise dissolve into fleeting, transcendent moments that demand your full attention: a chord, a seagull, a distant bell.

This house, too, operates as a set of interwoven histories. It carries a certain simple grandeur, yet is fragmented by moments that recall episodes of canonical architectural thought and fragments of the client’s own past.

The stair’s double-height window, for instance, echoes one childhood home, while the orientation of the kitchen and dining recalls another. These plainly domestic moments fold into a broader architectural collage, binding memory with history in a manner directly indebted to Sebald’s drifts.

Carlo Scarpa’s stepped details, used to choreograph movement and blur thresholds, are dotted around the building.

Nods to Gio Ponti’s use of deep blue as both ornament and structural accent, introduce bursts of intensity and give the house a playfulness.

A single Miesian column brings a dash of tectonic discipline, a moment at once a little absurd yet somehow not out of place.

Together, these elements form a kind of spatial collage. Yet, rather than the cut-and-paste chaos the word usually implies, the house feels holistic, light and calm, in the same way that Venice, despite its waves of disparate noise and field recordings, felt peaceful to me.

Working on the house felt like a negotiation between discipline and delight. The weighty meanings embedded in its details recede, becoming a backdrop for the everyday joys of domestic life, a walk through twentieth-century history that is also a continuation of the intimate settings of the occupant’s own past.

Location: Clifton Hill, Melbourne.

Completed: July 2025

Project Team:

Architect - James Harbard

Builder - Agora Homes

Engineering - Clive Steele Partners

Planning - URPS

Landscape - Gardens of the Sun

Pool Contractor - Form Pool Design

Photographer - Pier Carthew

Stylist- House Of Paule

Furniture and Objects: