James Hardie has partnered with Brisbane-based bespoke residential and commercial architects Michael Lineburg and Lynn Wang of Lineburg Wang on a conceptual collaboration that explores what is possible for the Australian home using a new innovation in building material: Hardie Fine Texture Cladding and its supporting range of corner and junction accessories.
Lineburg Wang’s ideas come to life with Pleated House, a conceptual extension of a pre-war Queenslander in inner-city Brisbane, which progresses ideas about contemporary living and the evolving relationship between the social rooms of the home and the exterior realm. The exterior of the extension is wrapped in Hardie Fine Texture Cladding, a pre-textured, fibre cement wall panel, and serves as a soft and stylized backdrop to the garden and its activities.
The Pleated House design concept connects a traditional timber Queenslander to the sloping terrain of a typical Brisbane backyard, creating light-filled, contemporary rooms that open onto a terraced garden. The design carefully stitches together component parts and reinforces a sense of cohesion and freedom in our domestic lives.
“The concept retains the old Queenslander and imagines the new extension as an ‘anchor’ – something that ties the house to the rolling hillside,” Lynn explains. “We wanted to ensure the contemporary architecture didn’t collide with or overwhelm the Queenslander, so it’s designed to be sensitive to and relate to the original house but also be distinct from it.”
The challenge to explore the possibilities and benefits of Hardie Fine Texture Cladding prompted Michael and Lynn to return to first principles of design. The extension comprises a double-height kitchen and living room with a mezzanine bedroom positioned to look beyond interior spaces towards framed vistas of sky and landscape. Level with the treetops, a roof terrace establishes a platform for gathering and after-dark stargazing.
“We always enjoy the challenge of exploring new products and new ways of construction – whether they be with bricks or blocks or sheet products,” says Michael. “There is a perception that sheet cladding can be one-dimensional, but we don’t think so. We wanted to demonstrate how a sense of movement can be achieved through the layering and pleating of panels and how a sense of depth can be amplified when textured surfaces combine with sunlight and shadow.”
Inspired by the surface of Hardie Fine Texture Cladding, Michael considered how to accentuate shadows using the cladding. Instead of applying it as a two-dimensional surface, the product is layered from the top down. As a result, this application offers architectural interest through varying surface dimensions and the shadows cast across the textured surface. The pleats of the exterior extension follow the sloping site downhill, creating continuity from the original dwelling and producing different levels for the eye to travel to and from. “The roof terrace over-emphasizes this cascading language with an oversized capping to the house below,” says Michael.
Hardie Fine Texture Cladding wraps the tall rooms of the extension, giving its robust form a luminescent, textural finish. “We wanted to celebrate the fact that the cladding is self-sufficient in the sense that it doesn’t rely on cover battens or stop mouldings to be waterproof,” Lynn says. “The cladding can turn a corner seamlessly and abut another sheet with a simple shiplap joint.”
The facade of Pleated House expresses the subtlety and rhythm of such panel connections. A strong datum is struck by horizontal joints establishing the pleated expression of overlapping edges – similar to the way the chamfer boards of the adjacent Queenslander overlap. “We wanted to amplify the textural quality of the cladding to create depth in the facade,” Michael says.
Hardie Fine Texture Cladding’s thin, sleek panels and lapping created a threshold between indoors and outdoors. The 8.5 millimetre panels have shiplap joints on the long edges, enabling a clean look and versatile implementation. “The varying sheet heights of Hardie Fine Texture Cladding (ranging from 2440 mm to 3600 mm) were used to manage datums of the pleats, that in turn relate back to the existing cottage and its own material datums,” says Lynn.
For Pleated House, Lineburg Wang used full-length 3600 mm panels to create a top-heavy form and a pleated, layered detail that accentuates the shadow and texture already inherent in the cladding. To promote cost efficiency and ease of construction, Lineburg Wang designed the extension to embrace the inherent qualities of Hardie Fine Texture Cladding. “The dimension of the sheet guided the size of the bespoke windows and doors,” Lynn says. “The tall window, for example, sits in the place of a 3.6 × 1.2 metre panel with the sliding door the equivalent dimension of five panels.”
To reinforce a sense of mass, windows and doors have deep, oversized reveals. This is particularly apparent on the ground floor, where the exterior wall folds inside to create a metre-deep recess. Hardie 9 mm Aluminium External Slimline Corners are integrated to achieve crisp corner junctions. “The kitchen has become a key social space – the heart of the home,” Michael says. “It is rarely the back-of-house zone it once was, so our concept focuses on the kitchen as a social room adjacent to outdoor space, offering connection to both its immediate and broader landscape.”
Pleated House is the second conceptual collaboration between James Hardie and leading Australian architects. More information about the collaborations, including the first collaboration with Sydney-based architecture firm Retallack Thompson, can be found here. More
