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Architecture & interiors — Adelaide, on Kaurna Country

Residential · Hospitality · Adaptive reuse

Buildings that hold light, weather and the life inside them.

Selected work The studio

Studio Marrow is a small architecture and interiors practice working on houses, restaurants and old buildings across Adelaide and the surrounding hills and coast. We draw slowly, build carefully, and leave rooms that are better in the afternoon than they were in the morning.

A light-filled living room with pale timber floors, a built-in timber window seat and a wall of timber-framed glass looking onto coastal scrub
01Semaphore house — the living room in the morning, looking west across the dunesAlteration and addition

Selected work

Five projects, chosen for what they taught us

Semaphore house: the kitchen end of the same room, a pale timber island under a high strip window, the window seat running along the glazed wall to the left
01

Semaphore house

Coastal cottage, alteration and addition

A weatherboard cottage opened to the west with one long timber window seat, so the whole house can watch the weather come in off the gulf.

Norwood infill house: a two-storey sand-brick facade with a deep clay-red window hood, a bluestone garden wall and a gum tree at golden hour
02

Norwood infill house

New house on a narrow lot

A narrow block, a mature gum kept, and one deep window that gives the street a face.

Unley courtyard house: a single crepe myrtle in a gravel courtyard between white rendered walls and a sand-brick wall, a timber door open to the room beyond
03

Unley courtyard house

Villa renovation, interiors and garden

A villa reorganised around a courtyard and one tree, so every room borrows light and a view of the sky.

Hindmarsh warehouse studio: a tall whitewashed brick volume with timber trusses, a sawtooth skylight, a new timber mezzanine and a clay-red steel stair
04

Hindmarsh warehouse studio

Adaptive reuse, workplace

An old brick shed, kept as a single tall room; the new work is a timber mezzanine and one red stair.

Willunga farm shop: a white card model of a gabled shed with a deep verandah, beside samples of clay brick, pale timber, bluestone, linen and lime render
05

Willunga farm shop

Hospitality, in design development

In the studio now: a farm shop and café as a shed with a wide verandah, in brick, bluestone and blackbutt.

We keep the published work short on purpose. The rest we would rather show you in the studio, with the drawings and the models on the table.

Ask to see more

The studio

A small practice, in a shared workshop in Hindmarsh

Every project begins with the site and the people, and only then the building. We measure the sun before we sketch.

Studio Marrow is run by two directors, an architect and an interior designer, with a small team who work on every job from the first walk-through to the last coat of oil. Architecture and interiors are not two departments here; the same hands draw the plan and choose the tapware.

We work in Adelaide's climate and with Adelaide's materials: brick and bluestone, lime render, blackbutt and spotted gum, corrugated steel, and gardens that survive February. Rooms are set out for cross-breezes and winter sun first, and machinery second.

Old buildings get particular care. We are as interested in what a villa or a warehouse has already worked out over its life as in what we might add, and our additions are meant to be legible as new without shouting about it.

The practice keeps its work small in number so the directors stay on every project. That is a decision about quality, not a limit on ambition; it is why the process below is unhurried, and why the drawings are thorough.

What a first meeting covers

Usually at your place, usually about an hour, and nothing is owed for it.

  1. A walk through the building or site, noting orientation, neighbours, trees, levels and what already works.
  2. How you live or trade now, and what you are hoping will be different: the brief, in your words.
  3. An honest first read of the planning and heritage constraints, and what they might mean for scale and timing.
  4. The money conversation, early: what your budget can reasonably reach, and where we would spend it first.
  5. How we work, what our fee proposal will contain, and what happens next if you would like to go ahead.

Services

Three ways of working, often on the same job

01

Architecture

New houses, alterations and additions, small hospitality buildings and studios, from feasibility through to the finished building and the defects walk.

  • Site analysis and feasibility
  • Sketch design and design development
  • Planning and development approval
  • Documentation for tender and construction
  • Contract administration on site
02

Interiors

Kitchens, bathrooms, joinery, lighting and finishes, for our own buildings and for existing ones, drawn to the millimetre and specified down to the hinge.

  • Spatial planning and joinery design
  • Materials, finishes and colour
  • Lighting layouts and fittings
  • Furniture selection and loose fit-out
  • Restaurant and café fit-outs
03

Heritage & adaptive reuse

Villas, cottages, churches and warehouses given a new use without losing what made them worth keeping, with the approvals handled from the start.

  • Building assessment and measured survey
  • Heritage impact statements
  • Conservation and repair strategy
  • New work within old fabric
  • Change-of-use and access upgrades

Process, in five moves

The same order every time, at a pace set by the project

  1. 1Listen

    Brief and site

    Where we start

    We visit, measure and photograph. We ask what a good day in the building looks like, and we write the brief back to you so we can both see it clearly before a line is drawn.

  2. 2Sketch

    Sketch design

    Two or three ways it could go

    Hand sketches, a rough model and a first plan. We test the options against sun, budget and the planning rules, and settle on the one worth developing.

  3. 3Resolve

    Design development

    The building takes its shape

    Structure, services, materials and joinery are worked through together. Rooms are drawn at a scale where the furniture fits and the light can be checked.

  4. 4Document

    Approvals and documentation

    Drawn so it can be priced and built

    We prepare the planning and building applications, then the full set for tender: plans, sections, details, schedules and specifications. Drawn so a builder can price it without guessing.

  5. 5Build

    On site

    Until the last door closes properly

    We administer the contract, visit regularly, answer the builder's questions quickly and check the work against the drawings. We come back after you have moved in.

Journal

Three notes from the drawing board, in brief

Materials

Choosing brick for a hot summer

Thermal mass is only useful if the night air can reach it. Notes on cavity walls, colour, and why we keep specifying the pale ones.

Read the note

A brick wall holds the day's heat and gives it back slowly, which is a virtue in a cold week and a liability in a hot one. It only works in a house that can be opened at night: windows on two sides, a path for the air, and someone willing to use them. If the plan cannot do that, the mass is just a storage heater, and we would rather insulate well and build light.

Colour matters more than the brochures admit. A pale, lightly textured brick reflects most of what falls on it; a dark smooth one drinks it. We keep specifying the sandy local ones for the west and north faces, and save the darker bricks for shaded courtyards and garden walls, where the stored warmth is welcome on a winter evening.

Old buildings

Reading a warehouse before you touch it

Where the water has been, which walls are doing the work, and what the roof trusses can tell you about what it will carry next.

Read the note

Start with the water. Tide marks on the brick, salts blooming at the base of a wall, a floor that has lifted along one edge: each tells you where the roof or the ground has failed and for how long. Before any plan, we map the stains, because they decide what can be kept and what must be repaired first.

Then find the walls that are working. In an old shed a surprising number are not; they were partitions, or infill between posts, and can go. The ones carrying the trusses cannot, and the trusses themselves tell you the span the building was made for and how much more it is willing to carry. New floors and mezzanines are planned to sit on the bones that are already there.

Rooms

In defence of the verandah

The oldest piece of South Australian climate engineering, and still the best. On depth, orientation, and where to put the table.

Read the note

A verandah is a roof with the walls left off, and that is the whole trick. It shades the wall behind it in summer, when the sun is high, and lets the low winter sun reach in underneath. Depth is the thing to get right: too shallow and it shades nothing, too deep and the rooms behind it go dim all year.

The east and north sides earn one; the west side mostly does not, because the afternoon sun comes in low beneath the roof and a verandah there only traps the heat. The table goes at the end nearest the kitchen, under the deepest part of the roof, where it can be used on the hottest evening and the wettest one.

Start with a conversation.

Tell us a little about the building and what you hope to do with it. One of the directors will reply and, if it looks like a fit, suggest a time to walk the site together.

Studio
Hindmarsh, Adelaide, South Australia. Ten minutes west of the city, in a shared workshop off Port Road. Visits by appointment.
Working
Across metropolitan Adelaide, the Adelaide Hills, the Fleurieu and the coast.
Country
We work on the lands of the Kaurna people and acknowledge their care of this place.
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