Craig Kerslake, managing director of majority Indigenous-owned firm Nguluway DesignInc, speaks to Australian Design Review (ADR) about what contemporary architectural narratives get wrong about privacy, and his desire to “layer connection”.

In his twenties, Wiradjuri man Craig Kerslake set out to find his Aboriginal family, having never known who they were. He was studying to become an architect at the time, and the encounter that followed would have a significant impact not only on Kerslake’s understanding of his lineage, but his understanding of architecture.

“My brother and I went out and we met up with an Aboriginal Elder, Aunty Gloria,” Kerslake tells ADR. 

“She invited us into her house, but when we first arrived we sat on the veranda of her house and we spoke there. After a while we went into the living room.”

Upon learning of Kerslake’s imminent profession, Aunty Gloria immediately started to talk to him about architecture.

“It was like this cultural obligation that I had to go and do things right and ‘right the wrong’, as she said,” Kerslake recounts. 

“Because, in her opinion, houses separated people. They kept people apart and made them lonely and sick.”

Aunty Gloria referred to public housing in particular, telling Kerslake it was designed to keep people focused on themselves and their personal freedoms. For example, a front yard connected her house to the main street. Once inside, you would walk down a hallway past the bedrooms into a private living space, followed by a private open space. 

“She said that essentially disconnected people from ‘the river’ – the people stream out the front,” Kerslake says. “And the house needed to be flipped and reversed so that you created moments of incidental connection.”

After a veranda was built onto the entrance of Aunty Gloria’s house, the front yard became “the most important yard”, where everything happened. 

“They turned the bedrooms into the living room and put the bedrooms at the back so it went from public to private, and the rear yard was just kind of a utility yard,” Kerslake explains.

“And she poked me in the chest and said, ‘You’ve got to go and fix housing if you’re going to become an architect’. It’s like my role as a Wiradjuri architect was to go and do this.”

Nguluway DesignInc

This formative experience is evident in Kerslake’s work two decades later. In addition to his position on the board of New South Wales’ Aboriginal Housing Office, Kerslake is the managing director of Nguluway DesignInc, a majority Indigenous-owned design firm on Gadigal land in Sydney. 

Offering architecture, interior, landscape and urban design services, Nguluway DesignInc specialises in ‘Designing from Country’, a practice that brings connection to Country to the forefront of design and interweaves cultural knowledge and traditions of place, led by the expertise of First Australians.

“It’s one thing to call yourself an Indigenous business, but then to actually successfully turn that into design outcomes is another thing that’s really important and hard to do, but it’s something we’re excelling in,” Kerslake says.

Implementing early lessons from Aunty Gloria

The team at Nguluway DesignInc recently decided to “literally” apply Aunty Gloria’s thinking to a multi-unit housing project, which was to consist of individual single-storey houses for First Nations seniors. Kerslake said the design team ended up “throwing out” the client’s initial reference design, which lacked meaningful spaces for people to gather.

“We reprioritised connection and relationships: relationships with people together and relationships with nature,” he says of the architectural program his firm created. It replaces a large row of houses, reprioritising balconies and verandas that each front onto a beautifully landscaped ‘neighbourhood’. The line represents a person’s journey, which leads to and connects beyond the site itself.

“Four dwellings per neighbourhood creates good social harmony for dwellings, it’s a general rule of thumb,” Kerslake says, explaining the program. 

“We reprioritised the site based on gather and connection. So, in Neighborhood C, these people can all connect together. If they want privacy, they retreat back into their house. There’s a layering of public to private, but it’s through the moments of incidental connection that you’re able to create those meaningful relationships in the first place.”

Brackish space

Kerslake has named these thresholds at which people come together ‘brackish spaces’. He says brackish water is a Dharawal story about the mixing of saltwater and freshwater at the ebb and flow of tides. 

“Sometimes the banks are really small and the water is high, and then other times there are big sandy mud flats and there’s a whole different ecology that happens in that transition. We look at that transition as being a significant place,” Kerslake says.

The concept of brackish space, rather than brackish water, gives primacy to a transformational space already considered culturally important.

“We need to consider these micro-thresholds between this space and that because that’s where the magic happens. The veranda is a great example; you have your interior and you have your exterior and this is a transition space,” he says.

“If you design it so it’s a deep veranda, for example – as opposed to a really shallow space where you wouldn’t feel comfortable sitting – if you made it four metres deep, people would want to sit there and hang out there all the time.”

Layering connection

Typically, the things that architects and designers design for are very black and white, according to Kerslake. 

“It’s focused on personal freedom – ‘let’s get away from other people’ – whereas this sees a more nuanced and sophisticated layering of connection,” he says.

Brackish spaces as a tool for mapping connection can be scaled up to precinct design, hospitals, residential colleges and even Nguluway DesignInc’s own offices. The team is currently applying this design thinking to a variety of housing projects.

When asked if clients are scared to embrace Nguluway DesingInc’s “reverse” design approach, Kerslake says “there is a lot of fear” at first.

“The fear that a lot of clients have is that it’s going to blow the budget. It’s going to get stuck in some sort of cultural mediation, constantly having to go back to Community, who might be difficult to work with. There’s a lot of fear about procurement actually, and then it might fail as a project typology,” he says.

When clients see that Nguluway DesignInc’s spatial planning doesn’t cost any extra money or take any longer, they’re “quick to say ‘this really makes sense’”.

“Other architects – not clients funnily enough – have said, ‘Yeah, but people don’t want to be with other people’. I think that that’s the sort of thinking that actually has led to the sickness that Aunty talked about, which is loneliness,” he says. 

“The architecture is so focused on personal freedom, it’s done such a good job at doing that, that people are disconnected. It’s hard to connect with people because the spatial outcomes are all focused on privacy.”

Privacy is still important and not to be underrated, says Kerslake. It’s just “not the only thing”. 

“We need layers of connection and privacy and I think that a lot of architectural narratives have that wrong.”

Photography supplied by Nguluway DesignInc.

Read about the collaborative process behind the winning design for Ngurra, Australia’s forthcoming National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural precinct.