Practicality wins over creativity as Kensington Lighthouse fails to sell at auction

The architectural feat of Melbourne’s inner west, the Kensington Lighthouse, was passed in at auction this weekend, despite attracting plenty of attention.

Designed by owner-architect Tim Hill of Tandem Studios, the award winning Kensington Lighthouse at 109 Rankins Road stands out on a street populated by worker’s cottages and the occasional new townhouse. Hill’s house has been featured in Grand Designs Magazine, Architecture Review and The New York Times.

The home represents a feat of architectural design, constrained as it is on a narrow 160 square metre plot, competing for both space and sunlight with its neighbours. Hill and Tandem’s solution was an innovative two story home, featuring two north facing “sun shells”, divided by a courtyard. With polished plywood ceilings that curved to meet the home’s southern walls, the house captures sunlight from a row of high placed windows on the home’s northern side to illuminate the entire interior.

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Materiality and form are at the centre of the Lighthouse’s design, which features industrial detailing and high quality finishes. The 5 star rated house includes a polished concrete floor with under floor gas fired hydronic heating, exposed timber beams, and a fascinating translucent danpalon (polycarbonate) façade maximising the penetration of light while maintaining privacy for the home’s residents.

However, it seemed that the two bedroom Kensington Lighthouse, for all the creative kudos it has received, had buyers in doubt over its practicality. With no interior doors save those for the home’s two bathrooms, the Lighthouse takes “open plan living” to the next level, a feature that may have scared off bidders on the day. As prospective buyers, design enthusiasts and sticky beaks (of which there was no shortage) poured through the house before Saturday’s auction, there was a lot of murmuring over who could possibly live in the Lighthouse.

Indeed the home, beautiful as it is, struggles to be liveable. The carport set below the property’s eastern floating “shell” is so low that it would struggle to accommodate a four wheel drive with roof racks, while no doors on the upper level bedrooms means no young children, who could take a tumble down the house’s stairs to its concrete floor.

A gap between the floor’s edge of one upper level bedroom and the home’s wall comes with no guard rail – while steel cabling stretched across the gap would prevent a full grown adult from falling to the house's lower level, a small child or pet might not be so lucky.

The concrete floor of the lower level visible in the gap between the unguarded edge of the upper level's floor and the home's wall. 

It seemed that buyers might have agreed. The vendors were expecting between $900,000 and $990,000, a far cry from the $266,700 the Hill spent on the plot in 2006. After failing to attract any opening bids, auctioneer Paul Harrison of Marston Cook started proceedings with a vendor bid of $900,000. The home attracted a single bid of $910,000, with no competitors. After consulting with the vendors, Harrison and Marston Cook’s Jayson Watts, who ran the Lighthouse’s campaign, emerged with a vendor bid of $950,000 – but no bidders took the bait.

jrichardson@propertyobserver.com.au