Across all four levels of Coogee House, timber veneer wraps wall panelling, internal doors, the main bedhead and its robes, study desks and floating shelves. With such extensive expanses, the joinery is the unifying palette throughout the house.
Timpelle started on the top floor and carried every detail – shadow lines, cabinetry components, grain spacing and direction – down through the house, one room flowing into the hallway and into the next. Standing at one end of the hallway, doors and panels run in a single parallel plane, so the rooms fall away as invisible and the view reads uninterrupted.
At the centre of the home’s joinery aesthetic is the crown. Each sheet of Eveneer Raw ALPI Xilo 2-Flamed Sand reads as a striking repeat crown rising vertically across the panel height.
The crowns continue, aligned across door faces, bulkheads and joinery, and the signature flames consistency and perfectly match across low and overhead cabinetry, carried across the entire home. For the built-in desks, the grain follows the corner of a shelf and runs unbroken from the wall to the face, to the underside to desk – so the eye reads it as a single sheet. “With a crown this prominent, you can’t compromise,” says Joseph Timpelle, adding, “We grain-matched it everywhere it needed to be matched,” mocking the entire run in the workshop before delivering to site.
Timpelle chose Eveneer Raw in Xilo 2-Flamed Sand to bring the warmth the home needed, a soft grey-brown that picks up the timber tones beneath the external awnings. Finished at ten per cent gloss rather than a heavier coat, it keeps a prominent, busy crown from overwhelming a deliberately minimal interior. “Minimalism can feel cold if the colour isn’t right,” Joseph notes.
Working with such a striking pattern, repeated at scale on over 300 panels, the batches of veneer were kept together floor by floor, and the veneer was supplied in the grain directions, thicknesses and opposing crowns the design demanded. Working with Elton Group, Joseph says that the “the flexibility in the product’s availability allowed for us to order different grain directions, crowns and crown patterns on different board thicknesses.” All of which helped make the project work on site.
Project: Coogee House
Joinery: Timpelle
Photography: Simon Whitbread