Fisher House
Warrandyte, Melbourne
This is the living end of a house that Alistair Knox designed and built at Warrandyte around 1970, originally with a single bedroom, and that its current owners, a photographer and a stylist who bought it in 2019, had renovated by architect Adriana Hanna. The grid of open spotted gum shelving and the built-in lounge beneath it are her work; the dark beams, the timber lining and the red brick floor are Knox's.
The white pier on the right is the house's own Hawthorn brick under render, Hanna's way of touching the original fabric as little as possible: "In order to minimise the impact to the existing building fabric, we chose to simply render all the internal Hawthorn brick so as to appear much like Knox's better-known mud-brick homes," she says. The owners' motto for the job, in the stylist's words, became "embrace the brown!"
Alistair Knox
Alistair Knox (1912 to 1986) was a designer, builder and landscape architect working in the Nillumbik district of Victoria from 1946, best known for reviving mud-brick building. He designed more than a thousand houses, of which around 350 were built.
Architecture Alistair Knox. Renovation Adriana Hanna Office (@adrianahannaoffice). Photography @gavin__green. Home of Sean Fennessy and Jess Lillico. Seen via @beachbungalows.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched September 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.