Batman House

The brief was relatively clear-cut: design a home in which the clients could see their young children from every angle. From that small seed of inspiration, Mike Cleaver of Clever Designs created a unique family home that not only met the requirements but challenged what was even thought possible.

“When I first visited the site, it was an inclement day and I took refuge in the macrocarpa pines located on the eastern boundary,” says Mike. “When the weather broke open there was a distinctive landmark. That landmark was the cable-hung Batman Bridge, and that became the design trigger.”

The simple form of the tensile structure masks the true complexity of the design. Emulating the bridge, the tensile rods achieve openness, depth and transparency in conjunction with high-performance double-glazing.

The dramatic cantilever of the main living spaces punctuates the landscape, allowing for maximum passive solar gain, while the home is completely wrapped in high-performance double-glazing. “The frames were a no-brainer for me,” says the designer. “I’ve used AWS before and the ability to mix and match some of their suites is fantastic when you’ve got a custom-built project like this. It was important for me to actually involve the manager of Glass Supplies. Glass Supplies are the Tasmanian fabricator for AWS. So, we had a meeting with the manager and the client/builder, and we went through all those tricky little couplings, and that was probably the only face-to-face meeting I had with my client throughout the whole build. That is pretty awesome when you look at the actual difficulty of this build…It looks like it’s really floating on the air.”