Pipi is a beautifully-sculpted residential and retail building in the heart of Bondi. Comprising 29 apartments atop ground floor retail, there is something both arresting and classical in the swooping gestures of the grand vertical bays that line Hall Street. The material palette adopts coastal, sun-bleached tones of light-grey concrete, white terracotta and brick: durable materials that will weather beautifully in context. Each façade is a study in folded planes and angled blades, animated by light falling across the pale surfaces.
Expand ContentThe building has a 5-storey appearance from the street, with a luxurious penthouse set back on the upper floor. This maintains the established building height of the street wall, while offering the penthouse grand terraces to all sides and sweeping views of the beach and surroundings.
Behind the 24m long street façade is a 36m deep site which is bound by neighbours on all three sides. Each of the neighbouring buildings have been built either to the boundary or with a one to two metre wide light wells to the boundary. Weaving a new apartment building into this congested site presents many challenges, including:
- Limited access to winter sun
- Poor outlook to the adjacent lightwells
- Challenging to make cross-ventilated apartments
This heavily constrained site required a clever solution to make apartments with great amenity.
The building was conceived as a T-form, where the hat of ‘T’ faces the street and the leg runs parallel to the long side of the boundaries creating lightwells on each side. These lightwells, with landscaped private courtyards at the base borrow air and light from the neighbouring lightwells to create visually and acoustically separated spaces.
Our solution in the leg of the ‘T’ was to create two-storey cross-over apartments where the access corridor to that rear wing is on every third floor. Off that corridor you can access two-storey apartments on that same level as well as the level above or below. As well as having an interlocked cross-section, the apartments have interlocking footprints that allow different unit types including one and two-bedroom apartments. This yielded many benefits including:
- The majority of living rooms are located on the north-west side
- Most apartments are naturally cross-ventilatied
- It minimised the ‘pancake effect’, where the upper-level apartments are bright and lower dark
In addition to these two-storey apartments there are four apartments per floor facing the street. They have been designed to facilitate oblique views down Hall St to Bondi Beach and whilst maintaining privacy and access to winter sun.
At the top, setback from the street, is a two-storey penthouse with sweeping views over Bondi Beach and the Pacific Ocean. The architecture here uses splayed concrete blades to frame views and protect glass from the hot sun. The finely detailed fenestration and super-clear glass disolves the barrier between inside and out, reinforced with the grey travertine floors extending from within to the expansive wrap around terraces on all four sides. Sculptural ceilings finished in white stucco lift to clerestory windows.
A monastic double height entry lobby off Hall Street features curved walls and ceilings and pale textured wall and floor tiles sets up the look and feel of the well-planned apartments.
The refined materiality of the facade is carried through to the interiors. The internal finishes follow the tonal qualities of the exterior, with off-form light-grey concrete ceilings, chalk-coloured floor tiles and whitewashed timber stairs. This is contrasted with myrtle flame timber veneer joinery and terracotta tiles in the bathrooms. Where possible views from inside the apartments are orientated to the ocean; and the blades act as a screen from the surrounding buildings.
2021 Winner Inde Award The Multi-Residential Building
