Le Cube, Toorak
Le Cube is luxury, bespoke design at its best. This symmetrical, almost perfectly square building exudes a natural balance and modern style that is truly unique.
Glenn Eagles, property developer/builder, Glenneagles Homes, created a cubic form on the street front with a limited palette of handmade Petersen Kolumba bricks, glazed stucco, precast concrete fencing and black steel accents. Not all new materials, but applied with new and different techniques.
Petersen bricks are an integral part of the external design, the bricks juxtapose their rich colour and texture against the plain flat surfaces of the windows and spandrel panels.
“I just love the boldness of the Petersen bricks, especially the soft, grey tones of the K91s with the element of blue to it, you just can’t get that colour in Australian bricks. It’s just beautiful,” says Glenn.
The bricks are used on the top storey, sitting above thick stucco, which is painted a glossy black on the base of the building, an age-old material applied in a thoroughly modern way. Using a special hopper imported from Germany, Glenn achieved a beautifully textured, thick solid base that’s a dramatic and wonderful textural contrast to the Petersen bricks.
Tthe whole upper skin of Petersen Kolumba bricks is counter-levered 150mm off the stucco base.
“We wanted to get that shadow and that thickened out effect, so it looks as though the top bricks are capturing the black base. And there was a lot of detail involved in working out the height of what we’d do. So we drew up initial sketches of how much of the bricks would be relevant to the base of the black stucco, and played around with height limits of what the stucco should be,” explains Glenn.
Image: Tom Blachford