Peek inside Brisbane’s House of the Year and the first multi-storey project in Queensland

The John Dalton Award for House of the Year 2014 was awarded late last week to Twofold Studio and Cox Rayner’s Highgate Hill House.

The modern house (pictured above) was commended for its bespoke, controlled garden and outdoor living zones sequence.

“A sublime piece of architecture, expressed through intricate detailing that is seamlessly engaged with an ironically humble brief. A visceral experience of occupation is manifest through a series of spatially modest but poetically executed rooms,” the jury explained.

An Enduring Architecture Prize was given to AH Job and RP Froud for the 1960s Torbreck (pictured below) – the first multi-storey home unit development seen in Queensland.

Also in Highate Hill, the project was built by NA Kratzmann Pty Ltd, who were one of the largest building contractors in Queensland in the late 1950s.

It is an eight-storey garden block, and was created with a lift-slab technique – something previously never used in Queensland. This required pre-fabricating the roof and floors on the ground and then lifting them into position. It also includes a fourteen-storey tower block.

Gallery photos by Christopher Frederick Jones courtesy of Cox Rayner Architects in collaboration with Twofold Studio