Strength, Not Ornament: The Distinctly Female Presence Behind Coogee House III.

There’s a street in Coogee where the Port Jackson figs have pushed their roots clean under the footpath, and for years, one of the last original interwar brick-and-tile bungalows sat quietly beneath them. It’s since made way for Coogee House III, a new home for a family of six by Tribe Studio Architects and interior designer Genevieve Hromas—and if the finished house has a signature move, it’s how hard it works to feel like it was always meant to be there.

The brief was deceptively simple: a robust coastal family home, one that could hold up under six humans and a dog, and let memories accumulate rather than get wiped clean. Hromas traces the whole project back to a single sensory cue—“the smell of sun-dried bricks after summer rain”—which became the poetic starting point for a home built to age, not stay pristine.

Sited alongside an existing fig tree on a tightly constrained suburban block, the house was designed to privilege landscape and generosity over street-facing display: a humble front door, a cascading garden, and an inverted spatial logic that pushes the expansive glazing upstairs, so the bedrooms get the leafy views.

Arent&Pyke Soften a Federation Home in Mosman with Curves, Colour and Slow-Crafted Stone.

Few Australian studios have built a business as quietly assured as Arent&Pyke. At Bradleys Head House, that same generosity of spirit fills every room—a Federation Arts and Crafts residence recast for a new generation.

Architecturally, the house reads as two bungalow-shaped pavilions stepping up the site, splitting kids from adults, public from private, with a central stair doubling as a thermal chimney between them. “It is a private world,” says architect Hannah Tribe, “where the modest street address belies the variety of nested forms and surprising volumes in the interior.” Red brick, gabled rooflines and the “pleasingly uncomfortable” brick compositions of the neighbourhood’s interwar apartment blocks all found their way into the palette—though the house’s one moment of real exuberance is a run of 23 self-supporting corbelled brick arches, stepping open toward the northern sun.

There’s a personal, almost matrilineal logic behind the detailing, too—one Tribe traces directly back to the client’s own history and craft. “References are drawn from our client’s childhood memories and notions of women’s craft,” she says. “The brick detailing is like stitches in a tapestry. Render like icing, timber dowelling recalls our client’s skill with leather. Detailing is an unexpected combination of refined and raw—it is an experiment in channelling our client’s memory and sentimentality and also aspiration and love of inventive creative resolution.” It’s a fitting way to describe a project shaped, from architect through to interior designer, by two women who clearly admired each other’s work—what Hromas herself calls “a distinctly female presence,” expressed through strength rather than ornament.

Inside, that same restraint gives way to warmth. Hromas layers a red cement floor—broken up by gridded glass mosaic thresholds that quietly track the family’s daily wear—against exposed LVL structure, a perforated steel stair, and a study clad in polished stainless steel designed to dissolve into reflected greenery rather than announce itself. In the kitchen, a silky oak island sits against Roma Blue quartzite and blue porcelain tiles laid with minimal grout. “Materials are chosen to deepen, mark and ripen with age,” Hromas explains—a pointed rejection of the short-cycle finishes so much of new residential work still leans on.

There’s real substance under the good looks, too: heat pump radiant heating, solar PV and battery storage, extensive rainwater harvesting, a natural pool and carbon-neutral brick, with the central stair pulling double duty as a thermal labyrinth to cool the house through summer without air conditioning—though the bedrooms, Tribe admits, ended up getting it anyway.

The project has already picked up formal recognition, including a win in the Residential Design category at the 2026 Australian Interior Design Awards and a commendation at the AIA NSW Architecture Awards. But the win that matters most, by the sound of it, belongs to the family living in it. “Hannah designed our house to foster closeness and creativity alongside privacy and functionality,” says the client. “Genevieve’s skill with interior materials—it’s out of the ordinary; intricate designs cast shadows in cool patterns, and rooms open up to let in breezes and the smells and sounds of nature. It’s simply beautiful.”

On the Edge of the Possible: Bokey Grant Architects' EA House in Mittagong, NSW.

There are houses that solve problems, and then there are houses that re-frame the question. EA House by Bokey Grant Architects, perched on an "unbuildable" cliff-face escarpment in Mittagong, falls squarely in the second camp.

[Principal Architect: Hannah Tribe. Project Architect: Maria Gutierrez Vargas. Interior Designer: Genevieve Hromas. Builder: P & S Design Construct Pty Ltd – Peter Fuchs. Bricklayers: MCM Masonry Pty Ltd. Structural and Hydraulic Engineer: Partridge. Landscape Consultant: Studio UC. Custom Lighting Design: OKO OLO. Styling by OKO OLO with Twentieth Century Ken Neale. Photography: David Chatfield.]