House tour: a Brutalist-style Melbourne home with an incredible art collection
An unassuming brick warehouse-like façade belies an incredible Brutalist home whose owners put art first, living second.
Photographed by Tom Blachford.
For art collectors Andrew Penn and Kallie Blauhorn, their shared vision for their dream home was an industrial-style space that first and foremost showcased their remarkable contemporary art collection.
“After years of looking for a more traditional home, we realised what we really wanted was a warehouse with the scale to showcase our passion for art and indulge in our shared desire to live in an industrial space,” Blauhorn says.
This idea of flipping the traditional model and putting art first informed every element, from the industrial warehouse that would eventually become their home, to the design studio—Melbourne-based Technē Architecture + Interior Design—they engaged to transform the space. “We were inspired by the work that Technē has done to date in integrating industrial and functional design in their hospitality projects and we believed this would suit what we were trying to achieve with our warehouse,” says Blauhorn. Adding: “The brief we gave Technē was to design a home where art came first and living came second. What we meant by this was that we wanted the spaces throughout the house to be designed to feature the artworks and then add function for our day-to-day needs.”