Honing singularity: Inside the studio of Tobias Partners
Architecture and interiors practice Tobias Partners needs little introduction. Their work is quintessentially Sydney and Sydney is deep within their roots. Houses are defined by the coast, pavilions brush with the bush and engage with views without shouting their presence. While the language of materials comes alive through texture and light, shaping moments where time slows down.
That quiet thinking, the care in every detail, the invisibility of all that effort has found a new home inside a former stable built in the 1880s, once the atelier of artist John Olsen and his Bakery Art School that hosted a new generation of artists in the late 60s, and more recently adapted into studios by Tzannes architects for the Sherman family. Mingling among galleries, restaurants and cafes, rows of Victorian terraces and plane trees, this is Sydney’s Saville Row for architects and the move marks a significant two and a half decades for the practice.
Before Nick Tobias had a shingle to hang over the door, and way before social media, the fledgling architect knew that showing up at events would get his photograph published in the social pages of the Sunday papers so he always made sure it appeared with the caption, ‘Nick Tobias, Architect’. It was 1999, not long out of university and a moment working with design firm Burley Katon Halliday, and Nick was itching to start building. With a list of projects from friends, and friends of friends, the opportunities, he remarks, were too good to ignore. ‘Having grown up a people person in a fairly affluent part of Sydney there were lots of people who knew I was a budding young architect and they kept asking me to do little things. I am a bit of a yes person, the team will tell you that I love an opportunity, and I was like great, let’s do it. I don’t have the experience but we’ll work it out.’
The first edition would be Tobias Theodore with architect Telly Theodore. They would be joined by architect John Richards, then designers Richard Peters and Matthew Krusin. Finally evolving into Tobias Partners and the studio’s structure today, with practice principles John, Matthew, Richard and their teams running, as Nick explains, ‘three practice units within the practice,’ Martine Merrylees running the interiors studio, and studio manager Sue Taylor helping to keep the ship on course.
It’s a practice model that has produced awarded projects and clients who like the clarity of approach. Teams have the freedom to stretch and focus their design skills and importantly create diversity under one umbrella, and clients regularly return to the rigour of the process with follow up commissions. ‘There’s no question that Matt’s buildings have a slightly different character to John and Richard’s buildings,’ Nick explains, ‘but from the outside people always say they recognise a Tobias Partners building. From the inside we know very clearly who has worked on what, however they are never running in opposite directions which makes our ability to collaborate very strong.’
Today, Tobias Partners is a close-knit studio of almost 20 (including one architect now back in London), a mix of creatives from here, the Dominican Republic, Scotland, Britain, the US and Armenia. It’s a place where people stay. Like a blended family, team culture has formed around shared histories, partnerships and kids, and connections through design, swimming, yoga and meditation. ‘You can call it god, a higher power, the universe, or you can just call it nature, it is a sense of something bigger than you that gives you a level of humility.’ Nick remarks. It may explain why more than half the team has worked together for over a decade, an impressive stat for an industry still struggling with work/life balance.
Above, left to right:
John Richards, Matthew Krusin, Nick Tobias, Richard Peters
Portrait © Justin Alexander
'I have been there [Deepwater House] on glorious summer days when the boat ramp was full of bathers plunging into the water from the rocks. Looking down from the top floor to the water’s depths was amazing.' – John Richards
Deepwater House
North Bondi, Sydney
Project team: John Richards, Nick Tobias, Robert Gemmel, Edmund Spencer, John Barker
All photography © Justin Alexander
Among the houses the practice has on site, and a dozen others at various stages of design development, projects can be found dotted around the eastern suburbs, along the northern beaches and further down the coast, from Tamarama to Freshwater, Whale Beach, Bellevue Hill, Darling Point and Bermagui, where landscape and location shape their approach. As the studio celebrates 25 years and new digs in Paddington, More Space goes behind the scenes with founder Nick Tobias, practice principals John Richards, Matthew Krusin and Richard Peters, and interior design associate Martine Merrylees.
Heidi Dokulil: Nick, I’ve known you for a long time because Richard has worked with you and the team since nearly the beginning, however I don’t know much about the very early days. How did you break out on your own?
Nick Tobias: I had some friends who had a sneaker brand called Royal Elastics. They were some of my best buddies growing up and they asked me to design trade exhibition stands for them. We did one for Sydney Fashion Week, then Vogue magazine asked me to do something for them, then Spin Communications wanted me to design all the catwalks for Fashion Week. We then took the Royal Elastics show to London, Düsseldorf and Miami, so it happened very organically. At the time I was 22, I didn’t have the technical capacity and when I ran into Telly Theodore at Fashion Week I asked him if he wanted to do it together. We did that for a few years before we both evolved into our own practices, and that was the birth of Tobias Partners.
No one likes to pick favourites, but it you had to choose one project that has helped define the practice, what would it be?
NT: There’s no question that Deepwater, which sits on the rocks at North Bondi, was one of those extraordinary opportunities. We were suddenly working on a totally unusual site on one of the most famous beaches in the world, totally exposed and different to any other site we’d worked on, and double the scale. That was a definitive project and it took us to the next level. That does seem to happen in waves every three to five years in terms of our ability to deliver something that’s even more refined. We won lots of awards for Deepwater, from the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA), to Houses magazine and Waverley Council,. For me, the one that was amazing was the AIA’s National People’s Choice Award. That really was wow, because if you’re not doing it for the public, who are you doing it for. It was a big moment for the practice.
John, as the principal architect on Deepwater, what does that project mean to you?
John Richards: It was a perfect storm between a client who was driven to produce something incredible, and, from the outset, adamant for it to be a potentially award-winning piece of architecture so quite visionary too, and the collaboration between us and Bellavarde who build beautifully. It’s a dramatic location without question and also very challenging. I think part of working with a client who is invested, and a builder who loves doing beautiful work, makes those challenges to a certain extent enjoyable, because you are also learning a lot.
I have been there on glorious summer days when the boat ramp was full of bathers plunging into the water from the rocks. Looking down from the top floor to the water’s depths was amazing. I’ve also been there on days when it’s tearing a southerly and the waves are moving mountains and that’s next level special. You can close all the doors and watch these rolling hills come in as if they would annihilate you, but they roll past while everything remains serene inside. It’s the closest I’ve ever felt to being on a yacht out in the middle of the ocean, and the way that house performs in such an unforgiving environment is a great outcome.
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'It was one hundred per cent a feeling [Camp Cove House]... to me that’s what we bring to our projects... It’s in the details, the junctions, the lighting and the materials, and the balance between all of those things.' – Nick Tobias
Camp Cove House
Camp Cove, Sydney
Project team: Nick Tobias, Martine Merrylees, Kyle Reid, Campbell Baird
All photography © Anson Smart
Above: Nick Tobias relaxing with his guitar
on Edra's On The Rocks sofa.
Can we also talk about Treetops, Lavender Bay and Camp Cove, where the natural landscape is equally present.
JR: Treetops is quite a brutalist contemporary piece of architecture on a very different site to Deepwater. It’s at the top of Woollahra above an old quarry and looks down through the valley towards Double Bay. You are literally in the treetops when you enter at street level, the house is serene with the doors and the windows open, you’re surrounded by nature and you don’t get a sense of much else. It’s all trees, green, beautiful. A different type of calm to being perched on the edge of the rocks at Bondi. That synergy between the building and the landscape is so important in our work.
Nick, you redesigned a house in Camp Cove for you and your two sons. What was at the top of that brief, or was it less of a list and more of a feeling you wanted to create?
NT: It was one hundred per cent a feeling and I think the nicest thing is the overwhelming feedback from myself and my children most importantly, but also from others, that it feels great. To me that’s what we bring to our projects as the fundamental layer. It’s in the details, the junctions, the lighting and the materials, and the balance between all of those things. The team is so good at doing that, the feeling is that special creative source. A lot of people respond to the calmness and serenity of our work.
There wasn’t a super fixed brief, it was something that evolved. It started as new paint and carpets and ended up a full blown renovation. It was like my divorce present to myself. I had been through a very difficult part of my life with a divorce and the death of my mother and it all happened simultaneously. So this was coming out the other side. It was an amazing cathartic process to be designing this house for me and my boys, embracing the brokenness and also the future. It was a very liberating process.
Working with Nick on the project Martine, what was your approach to the interiors?
Martine Merryleys: It was a really easy job in a way because Nick and I have a similar aesthetic. We like interiors that are a little bit free and full of personality, and we like there to be surprises. I think we’re always looking for that special thing about each project. With Nick’s house it was an amazing spot, the lounge room and its outlook to the garden, the beautiful feel that’s both playful and open to the outside. Nick has great pieces of art and design that he’s collected over the years, like the leather Cab chairs that are classics, we then added the Edra On the Rocks sofa which is very laid back and flexible. That was one of the first times I chose Edra but we now use it in almost every project. They really are the best sofas.
Understanding how a client lives seems like one of the biggest steps.
MM: There are a lot of conversations so the journey starts there. Once we understand how they want to use each space we talk about other requirements, whether that’s pets, children, neck problems, function for me is super important. With the Lavender Bay project, the clients also wanted to know the history of the brands and the story behind each piece, they were then willing to take on certain pieces of furniture. I think that’s the impact of Milan Design Week. I took one of our clients this year and it was a crash course in interior design. We met the designers and now the stories and the romance behind it all connects with her. Personally it’s where I get most of my inspiration, where I can just focus on furniture. It also gives us a head start on what’s coming through and clients love that.
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Treetops House
Woollahra, Sydney
Project team: John Richards, Nick Tobias, Natalie Condon, Kyle Reid, John Barker
All photography © Justin Alexander
Richard, staying in the Lavender Bay House over the summer a few years ago really gave me an insight into the quiet beauty of texture, light, sculpted views and secret gardens. How did you create such calmness and privacy on one of the world's busiest harbours?
Often houses on the harbour have a very one-dimensional view, here we wanted to create private internal gardens, view glimpses and quieter spaces for the family to enjoy. It’s a challenging site that drops 16 metres to the foreshore so the project required deep excavation to accommodate both spatial requirements and maintain view-corridors for surrounding properties, and to avoid view loss or shadow impact, in particular for the large apartment building to the south. So fundamental to the brief was the clear articulation of what is a complex three-dimensional plan that prioritises harbour views to the east, solar penetration from the north and the scale and inter-connectedness of all the levels. Beyond that dramatic harbour outlook, the monumental staircase catches changing perspectives of light and vistas and connects the family through spaces both public and social, private and quiet. Overlapping geometries capture the sky, the water and the landscape. While that calmness is also found in the finely detailed natural materials left textured and unadorned including concrete, timber and stone. It’s quite amazing how the house captures so many moments throughout the day, that interface with nature is everything.
Lavender Bay House
Lavender Bay, Sydney
Project team: Richard Peters, Timothy Hungerford, Julia Cumines, Nick Tobias, Martine Merrylees
All photography © Justin Alexander
Above right: Materic table with marble top and timber base designed by Piero Lissoni for Porro. Above: Single Curve Bar Stools by Nendo for Gebrüder Thonet Vienna GmbH. Below right: Extra Sofa sofa by Piero Lissoni for Living Divani, Tobi-Ishi coffee table in brushed light oak and Button coffee table in white lacquer, both by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby for B&B Italia. Bottom left: Tufty-Time sofa with Fat-Fat large and small coffee tables, both by Patricia Urquiola for B&B Italia.
Above:
Haxstead Garden House, Central Tilba, Sapphire Coast, NSW
Project Team: Richard Peters, Julia Cumines, Nick Tobias
All photography © Justin Alexander
Beauty can be found in big design moves, but also in the smaller gestures, the honed materials, the quiet detailing. Matthew, you recently completed the Woollahra Village House and it’s a great example of those quieter gestures.
Matthew Krusin: The house was a fairly intricate exercise on a smaller scale to the houses we often do. The client was wonderful and gave us free rein to focus on every single corner. We advised them that although we could squeeze a third storey on top, it would be a far more enjoyable house if we kept it to two stories and they went for it. The house is a composition of four different façades running from the original street front to the back lane. There’s nothing that feels big in scale so the house feels warm, even with the stair void it has an incredibly human scale and the length of the treads allow you to stroll up them. When you’re dealing with this scale it’s about moments in space that feel good throughout the day. They don’t have to be big voids or have enormous views, they can be smaller moments of joy. It was also about working the proportion so that when you’re sitting in the garden or looking out from one building to another, we made sure it felt private. There’s never a point where you even notice the neighbours and the garden feels as much of an environment as the interior, surrounded by the sky and the treetops and the occasional parapet and chimney in the distance.
You have said that it was a lot about playing with light.
MK: I was thinking about the Canova Museum in Possagno, Italy, by Carlo Scarpa, where corner windows allow light in at different angles during the day. Here, the skylight with its timber portals flanks the landing, opening and closing to the study nook. At the half landing, a hinged panel filters light down to the front study, and directly above it is the ensuite bathroom that has a highlight panel to bring light in. So that one skylight is lighting about five different spaces.
'... the [Woollahra Village] house feels warm, even with the stair void it has an incredibly human scale... it’s about moments in space that feel good throughout the day. They don’t have to be big voids or have enormous views, they can be smaller moments of joy.' – Matthew Krusin
Woollahra Village House
Woollahra, Sydney
Project team: Matthew Krusiin, Amanda Clark, Campbell Baird, Nick Tobias
All photography © Justin Alexander
Above:
Collins Beach House
Manly, Sydney
Project team: Matthew Krusin, Natalie Condon, Martine Merrylees
All photography © Justin Alexander
Image 2: Alanda coffee table by Paola Piva for B&B Italia. Image 3 & 4: Single Curve Bar Stools by Nendo for Gebrüder Thonet Vienna GmbH, Container Table (outside) by Marcel Wanders for Moooi. Image 5: Sigmund Bench by Studio Asai for Arflex.
Nick, how do you describe the space where the practice has found its voice?
NT: We strive for this beautiful little golden nugget that’s distilled and refined and resolved and carefully crafted, and as beautiful and perfect as it can be. There’s no question that Matt’s buildings have a slightly different character to John and Richard’s buildings. From the outside people always say they recognise a Tobias Partners building, from the inside we know very clearly who has worked on what, but they are never running in opposite directions which makes our ability to collaborate very strong. It’s the process of distillation which is rigorous and sometimes painful and playful and frustrating and you feel you’re never going to get there. I’m rarely working in the coalface of that. It’s Richard, John and Matt who have this amazing capacity and tenacity to hold all of those things at the big end of the funnel, and hold the vision as they simultaneously go through the process that can be very tumultuous. Together as a practice we find our ethos around the rigour of those ideas, resolving all of the details and getting to that beautifully formed thing at the end.
I know that wellbeing is also actively practiced by the studio.
NT: It's so important and something we share. Whether it’s ocean swimming, meditation or yoga, without your wellbeing you’ve got nothing. It’s a bit cliché but it’s really true. It connects you. You can call it God, a higher power, the universe, or you can just call it nature, it is a sense of something bigger than you that gives you a level of humility. Circling that back to creativity, I think a really important part of being a good creative without sounding esoteric, is being able to access a well of creative source rather than just ideas. David Lynch wrote a beautiful book called ‘How to Catch a Big Fish’ and it was about his creative process through the prism of meditation, how you’ve got to dive deep. The other one for me that’s really important is music. Listening to music, playing music and being immersed in it is another level.
RP: Ocean swimming for me is the ultimate form of meditation. I swim at Coogee beach every morning and it's where I work out a lot of design ideas. The ocean really is creative nirvana and a very magical place.
Is there something you’ve always wanted to design that you’d jump at if given the chance?
JR: I am quite content with houses, to hone that art. I’m interested in making architecture gel without getting metaphysical or carried away with grand architectural gesture. I try to keep it very human and tactile, taking it to the micro-level of detail with materials that give synergy between hard architectural structure and warmth through timber.
MK: Since I was young I have marvelled at the landscapes in France and Switzerland. The closest I have come to designing for that incredible scenery and climatic extremes was the concept design for a house near Arrowtown on the South Island of New Zealand overlooking Lake Hayes. I am also intrigued by public squares and buildings that create them. A recent one that struck me was the Republic Square in Valletta, Malta.
RP: I'm working on some great houses right now but if I were to dream, I'd also like to design a small house for myself on an amazing site along the east coast of Australia. It would be built into the landscape amongst the trees, next to the ocean so that I can walk down for a morning swim and a surf when the swell is just right.
NT: There are a couple of projects we’ve designed that haven’t been built yet. A house that Richard and I worked on down in Gerringong. What I love about that design is that it was a totally intuitive response to a complex problem so to build that one day would be amazing. There’s also the community-funded Jewish funeral chapel in Woollahra that is a heritage building and I worked with Matt on a new infill building next to it. Working with the complexity of religion, the process of death and dying, family, grieving, mourning, comfort and ascendance, all of those things, was beautiful.
Above:
Image 1, 2 & 3: Gerringong House
Project team: Richard Peters, Julia Cumines, Nick Tobias
Renderings by Julia Cumines
Image 4: Woollahra Chapel
Project team: Matthew Krusin, Nick Tobias, Campbell Baird
Rendering by David Lindaya
Finally, as we come up to the summer break, design and architecture is such a catalyst for exploring the world. Are there places that have influenced you?
NK: Just before I started the practice I went to see Palladio’s villas in the Veneto and that was extraordinary and remains hugely influential. They still relate to how I think about our work today. Then there are all of Peter Zumthor’s buildings I’ve tracked down around the world from Switzerland to Norway. Most moving was the Steilneset Memorial he designed with Louis Bourgeois in a town called Vardø at the very tip of Norway near the Russian border. It’s breathtaking. Then of course the thermal baths in Vals, Switzerland, and his own house which I snuck around, the scale is beautiful. When you talk about the craft of materials and context, he’s a master.
MK: There is a small-ish gallery in St Paul de Vence in the south of France called Fondation Maeght. Everything about this project feels good. Its setting, its intention, its scale, the uplifting effect it had on me and my friends. I’d go there every week if I could. Similarly, but for different reasons, a lesser known Le Corbusier project on the fringes of Paris called Maisons Jaoul that was built for one client and two families. I went there a long time ago and loved the intimacy of the spaces, the voids and openings, and its intriguingly unimposing scale.
MM: Definitely the Italians, they just really went for it. I love Joe Colombo and Superstudio who were so full of ideas, and the Italian manufacturing industry where people still work their whole lives, stitching leather or braiding rope. The younger groups like 6:am Glassworks who customise pieces in traditional Murano glass and the designer Hannes Peer, both of whom I’ve met over the last couple of years in Milan. It's great they are carrying on the crafts.
RP: Of course Mexico City and the work of Luis Barragán.
JR: My driver is nature, so getting away to mountains, the ocean and the beach. Away from architecture, to decompress. For me it’s about appreciating the landscape from within a building so maybe that’s why I search out these places to reconnect.
Wishing you a very well deserved summer break. Thanks for making the time to talk with More Space, it was great chatting with you all.