Renault House

Renault House captures the romanticism of Sydney Harbour’s beauty by careful siting. Dawn brings natural light deep into the interiors animating shadows that shift with the hours and seasons. Rational planning provides generous public and private zones for formal entertaining and informal family life. The carefully chosen palette of materials, stone, timber, white bricks and generous glazing are consistent with the career work of Harry Seidler & Associates and illustrate the practice’s embrace of the principles of 20th century modernist design.

Renault House was commissioned in 1969 by Madame Jeanne Renault, a renowned restauranteur and vintner. Madame Jeanne Renault arrived in Australia from France in 1937 to join her husband Henri (d.1957), a prominent wool-buyer for French textile manufacturers. Following wartime adventures that found the couple in China, they returned to Sydney establishing a well-regarded French restaurant The Hermitage located at 10-18 Ash Street, Sydney in 1942. The Hermitage became the headquarters for weekly meetings of the Wine and Food Society.[1] In 1951, they established Henry Renault Pty. Ltd (Importers of Continental Wines, Liqueurs and Delicacies) with a sampling room above their restaurant.

Using an H-shaped plan, the house provides discrete public and private zones carefully arranged for maximum effect and function. As critic Peter Blake has observed of Seidler’s design work, “the reality of the space created by [...] juxtaposed slabs [is] one of organic flow, rather than rectangular constraints.” For example, the multi-level plan of the Renault House design can be said to “expand space, instead of restricting it.”[2]

From the beginning of his architectural practice, Seidler wrote that “our buildings must be flexible. From the factory, the school and even the domestic building we expect that it will adapt itself readily to the demands we put on it.” [3]

When the house was acquired by the current custodian in 1994, additions were commissioned from the award-winning Kevin Snell practice (Snell Architects) providing a near seamless extension of the original design. [4] The resident, a Chartered Accountant was well aware of the responsibilities of owning an original Harry Seidler & Associates house.

The Renault House shares notable features with several Harry Seidler & Associates houses designed in the late 1960s and early 1970s this includes the white masonry blocks and stone-paved floor found in Seidler’s own house (Killara, 1966-1967), the Gissing House (Wahroonga,1972) and the landscape-shaping elements of curved masonry walls used as screens and enclosures in his Pettit and Sevitt exhibition house, Westleigh (1969).

On the lower-level floor below, the more informal family areas of Renault House are carefully placed for solitude and the setting. The lower-level family room and adjoining bedrooms also feature expansive views over Middle Harbour and a Martinazzo-landscaped pool enclosed by a pillared wall of Arabascato marble.

Castle Cove is one of three picturesque coves in the upper reaches of Middle Harbour, Sydney. These steep-sided inlets are protected by bushland reserves of 90 percent coverage of mature trees such as Sydney red apple and the sinuous Angophora costata.[5] The dramatic site of Renault House sits atop the cove ridge line following Neerim Road, some 90 metres above the Harbour.

Architectural Copy + Research: Michael Bogle, PhD, design historian
Architectural Marketing + Strategy: Natalie Louw

References:
1. John Ramsay, “Your Gastronomic Guide to Sydney”, The Daily Telegraph,30 November 1946, p.14.

2. Peter Blake, Architecture for the New World. The Work of Harry Seidler, Horwitz Australia, 1973, p.33.

3.Harry Seidler, Houses, Interiors, Projects, Associated General Publications, 1954, p.xv.

4.Lloyd Rees Award by the Royal Australian Institute of Architects for the Newcastle Queens Wharf precinct, www.studiosnell.com/kev... 29 December 2021.

5. A.W. White & Shelley Burgin, “Current status and future prospects of reptiles and frogs in Sydney’s urban-impacted bushland reserves”. Urban Wildlife: more than meets the eye, Daniel Lunney and Shelley Burgin, eds., 2004. Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, Mosman, NSW, pp.109-123, 2004.