Several years ago we visited the Heide II gallery in Bulleen. When we realised this amazing building was originally a house designed for the art patrons John and Sunday Reed, our fascination with Modernist domestic architecture was unleashed. We soon contacted Neil Everist (the surviving partner from the firm McGlashan Everist) and a friendship began. We made a small film on a house that the firm designed back in the sixties, which can be viewed here on the Traces site. The house is now Neil’s holiday home.

Over the following years, fuelled by a continuing love for Modernist design we slowly gathered research on Australian domestic Modernism. The architects, their houses and clients etc. This culminated in us applying for and gaining a creative fellowship at the State Library of Victoria in 2008. We were given our own room and unlimited access to the great Australian design journals from the era (spanning the late 1940s to the mid 1970s) and other collections such as the amazing slide collection by the late photographer Peter Wille.

Soon-after we applied for development funding from Screen Australia and were successful. With that money we were able to travel to Sydney and Canberra and conduct in depth interviews with many architects from the period as well as some original clients. This also included filming many interviews in Melbourne too.

This was an inspiring experience. A majority of the architects we interviewed still maintained their passion and fiery ambition to create a new way forward in residential architecture. Despite their advanced years (most of them are in their eighties and beyond) their passion and spiritual sensibility had by no means faded. Their love for nature and their respect for their craft was vibrant and alive.

We found the clients equally engaging, they appeared to be a mix of mostly educated people who had an appreciation and understanding for the modern ethos and were bold and brave enough to enter a rather unknown territory.
The fact that they still resided in these homes after fifty years speaks volumes.

We are now at the point were the plan is to create a short teaser which will impress both Screen Australia for production funding as well as the ABC to agree to be the broadcasters of what will likely become a three part documentary series on this subject.

Philip Goad from Melbourne Uni and Doug Evans (ex RMIT) are acting as our unofficial content consultants (ie: experts on this subject) and have both been incredible wells of knowledge.

The architects we have interviewed: