Area: 630sqm
Family size: 4
Photography: Jack Lovel
Design: Davidov Architects
About Studio
As a design studio, we work together with our clients to distill their needs, discarding the latest trends to arrive at an outcome that simply enhances and supports their lifestyle. Our designs are understated in character, opting for a sense of permanence and solidity in their execution. Material, space, and light are modified through a lens of simplicity creating meaningful spaces that nourish and uplift us.
Through a pared-back approach to our architecture and interiors, our work spans a range of scales and typologies from private houses, multi-residential projects, and homewares to institutional work. Our approach to each new commission is to build a strong relationship with our clients to unlock their vision.
To do this we must first gain an understanding of our client’s motivations and character as well as an understanding of the site and its potential. By discarding the latest trends and embracing an approach of simplicity and order, we arrive at a pragmatic yet poetic outcome.
The studio’s design direction is driven by a desire for refined simplicity and the personal; drawing inspiration from memory and an appreciation of the understated and vernacular. Travels through the Levant, Latin America, and rural Europe meld with recollections of life in Melbourne.
Our designs focus on crafting warm minimalist spaces through the principles of proportion, spatial sequence, composition, materiality, and light. The result is the creation of architecture that is timeless. Robert Davidov is an active member of the local architecture community being heavily involved as a committee member of Architeam and is currently mentoring the next generation of architects through the University of Melbourne and the Australian Institute of Architects.
He was awarded the Ernest Fooks Memorial Award for Design and the FMSA Award for Architecture and Construction. He has been named to the Dean’s Honours List on 5 occasions.
Sympathetically renewing and extending an existing mid-century home in Caulfield North, RSB Residence was an opportunity to contribute to an area of Melbourne renowned for its mid-century housing.
For this reason, the primary approach to the architectural intervention was one of sensitivity and restraint, opening up living areas in this four-bedroom home whilst retaining the low-slung, single-level presentation to the street. The preservation and enhancement of the landscaping areas and courtyards were treated more as outdoor rooms rather than traditional gardens.
The robust and minimal materiality of the exterior is carried onto the interiors through the use of simple grey granite slab flooring, and the use of full-height panels to conceal cabinetry and doors. A space of more intimate scale and proportion, the family room employs a palette of warm neutrals and soft inbuilt seating, contrasting the crisper lines of the building’s interior.
