Bricks are back and they're building a new wave of creativity
Perth brick companies are putting the zing back into bricks, providing creative and collective hubs and offering architects through to tradesmen the opportunity to share ideas in trendy inner-city studios.
Architecturally designed display studios fitted with hot desks, innovative product displays, air-share boardrooms and commercial kitchens are influencing the collaborative process within in the building industry.
Emerging from the backwaters of traditional industrial zones, a series of uber-stylish brick design studios now feature in the fashion hotspots of Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Tasmania and Perth.
Maddison Architects used different colours and forms of brick to evoke the solidity of a traditional European beer hall. Photos: Maddison Architects
The Perth Brickworks studio sits proudly alongside the high end stores of Chanel, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co in trendy King Street, the playground of Perth’s fashionistas.
The appointment of Kate Waterhouse as the company’s national style ambassador resonates well with building and construction creatives.
Maddison Architects used different colours and forms of brick to evoke the solidity of a traditional European beer hall. Photos: Maddison Architects
Studio lighting, mood boards and stylish presentations of the latest products have carefully been designed to inspire a broad range of clients from home owners to architects and designers.
Looking more like a boutique bar than a brick showroom, the Perth studio features a latticed Jali wall uplit in dramatic red and coupled with polished wooden floors. The display benches are all on coasters and easily stowed away to allow for industry functions.
Downstairs a pod style boardroom offers guests interconnectivity and direct access to the technical library, alongside hot desks for mobile creatives and a commercial kitchen.
Across town in trendy Subiaco, Perth’s Midland Brick has engaged designers Michael & Hamish Design Studio to reimage its display space at the front entrance of Home Base showroom.
Midland Brick asked designers Michael & Hamish Design Studio to reimagine its display space at the front entrance of its Home Base showroom in Subiaco. Photo: Midland Brick
The space has a sense of theatre and drama, with sweeping curved table and an accessible boardroom which functions as a creative space and the display centre’s engine room.
Midland Brick says the creative approach is stimulating a new wave of designs featuring ever evolving building materials.
Creative inspiration
Back on King Street, Brickworks design studio manager Aleshia Bowes has a role more akin to a gallery curator. With new products coming out of the company’s creative department on a regular basis, she is passionate about the opportunities the design studio offers architects and industry professionals.
“The Brickworks Design Studio is a very exciting development for us, and provides the Brickworks brand with a premium street profile in this high end location,” Ms Bowes said.
Brickworks design studio manager Aleshia Bowes is passionate about the opportunities the design studios offer creative architects and industry professionals. Photo: Doug Green
Ms Bowes was pleased that architects and designers regularly visited the studio to source products, technical specifications, inspiration and general information about new products.
“As it is conveniently close to a number of commercial, developer and architectural offices in the CBD, we envisage the Design Studio will be utilised by a number of architects and designers for specifications as well as networking events,” Ms Bowes said.
Sexy bricks
Commentators says 2016 is the year in which bricks have become sexy in Australia again.
In Southbank Melbourne, Maddison Architects’ have used snub-nosed white, black and glazed bricks as a modern take on a traditional European beer hall. While in central Victoria, hand-made brick company Euroa Clay Products has just delivered 20,000 custom silver glazed bricks to a school project.
In July, Domain reported on the trend of colourful bricks leaping back into vogue. Master bricklayers were being co-opted to collaborate with architects and designers.
The prestigious Think Brick Awards in Sydney has just celebrated its biggest field ever with 330 entries.
Think Brick Australia CEO Elizabeth McIntyre said that without doubt and after being temporarily usurped by rendered blue board, “homeowners and builders have rediscovered the durability of brick”.
Architects, she says, have been leading the charge and because they are “exploring a product now available in over 1000 colours we’ve got all these amazing new projects that are really ground-breaking.
“Brick is back on centre stage and it is much more contemporary.”
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