Lyons House, Robin Boyd, Sydney

Home-visit to a Melbourne-in-Sydney modernist classic, and the importance of clients who not only know what they want, but can express it in terms that increasingly make sense 40 years later.

2nd August, 2008. The Trimbles and I drove down to the south of Sydney to see the Lyons House. Designed by the great Robin Boyd in 1966, it’s a wonderful house, and still inhabited by the original owner, Dr. Lyons, some 40 years on.

After Boyd died young, aged only 52 in 1971, Joseph Burke said he was “the artistic conscience of his country, in the future of which he believed passionately.” That gives a sense of his importance as an architect — particularly in practice with Roy Grounds and Frederick Romberg — but also as an influential writer and critic. I’ve mentioned his influential The Australian Ugliness before, but more influential were his weekly columns for The Age, work for the Small Homes Service and his…