Carved from earth to sky, etched in light

Some houses sit on their site. This one was carved from it.

Elemental House is a four-year new build in Sydney's eastern suburbs that began not with walls rising, but with deep excavation - a geological act that shaped everything that followed. Led by Studio Director Jessica Gombault of Alexandra Kidd Interior Design, in close collaboration with architect Marcellino Sain of M.A.R.S and builder Cumberland Building, the project unfolds as a vertical journey from earth to sky: grounded and dense at its base, rising through four levels until the uppermost floor floats at canopy height in a wash of ethereal light - as though lifted to treetop.

The design was anchored from the outset by a line from sculptor Giuseppe Penone: "The definition of art is the vitalisation of nature, revealing the vitality of the material." Three ideas shaped the response - human trace and nature, material expression, and the tension between organic and geometric form. What emerged is a house with genuine impression: one that holds surprising privacy behind a facade of apparent openness, and that changes tangibly with the passage of light - the experience of it never quite the same twice.

Material decisions were treated as architectural - shaping mood, spatial sequence and logic from the ground up. The result moves between registers without losing coherence. Moody lower-ground entertaining. A ground floor where dark and light finishes meet in full contrast, anchored by a kitchen that is as much sculpture as workspace. A top floor that lifts entirely into calm. Living finishes - stone, timber, bronze - are chosen to age, to mark, to carry memory as a story of time. The bathrooms are jewel boxes: intimate, unexpected, each entirely their own.

The most personal gesture is embedded at the home's foundation. During the four-year build, the client and her teenage daughters gathered fragments - off-cuts from stone suppliers, pieces of marble and glass kept across the years of construction. From these, they made two bespoke terrazzo panels by hand. Set into the floors at the garage entry and the lower ground foyer - the home's two most earthbound points - these elements are not decorative but are the family's signature on a house they spent four years building, set permanently into the stone where the house begins and welcomes.

Rooted in earth, open to sky, the result is not a home you settle into, but one that settles into you.

As featured in Vogue Living.