Strength, Not Ornament: The Distinctly Female Presence Behind Coogee House III

Strength, Not Ornament: The Distinctly Female Presence Behind Coogee House III.

A Home Built to Age

There’s a street in Coogee where the Port Jackson figs have pushed their roots clean under the footpath, and for years, one of the last original interwar brick-and-tile bungalows sat quietly beneath them. It’s since made way for Coogee House III, a new home for a family of six by Tribe Studio Architects and interior designer Genevieve Hromas—and if the finished house has a signature move, it’s how hard it works to feel like it was always meant to be there.

The brief was deceptively simple: a robust coastal family home, one that could hold up under six humans and a dog, and let memories accumulate rather than get wiped clean. Hromas traces the whole project back to a single sensory cue—“the smell of sun-dried bricks after summer rain”—which became the poetic starting point for a home built to age, not stay pristine.

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Sited alongside an existing fig tree on a tightly constrained suburban block, the house was designed to privilege setting and generosity over street-facing display: a humble front door, a cascading garden, and an inverted spatial logic that pushes the expansive glazing upstairs, so the bedrooms get the leafy views.

Nested Forms and Thermal Logic

Architecturally, the house reads as two bungalow-shaped pavilions stepping up the site, splitting kids from adults, public from private, with a central stair doubling as a thermal chimney between them. “It is a private world,” says architect Hannah Tribe, “where the modest street address belies the variety of nested forms and surprising volumes in the interior.” Red brick, gabled rooflines and the “pleasingly uncomfortable” brick compositions of the neighbourhood’s interwar apartment blocks all found their way into the palette—though the house’s one moment of real exuberance is a run of 23 self-supporting corbelled brick arches, stepping open toward the northern sun.

References are drawn from the client’s childhood memories and notions of women’s craft, the architect notes. Brick detailing mimics stitching in a mix. Render like icing, timber dowelling recalls the client’s skill with leather. Detailing is an unexpected combination of refined and raw—it is an experiment in channelling the client’s memory and sentimentality and also aspiration and love of inventive creative resolution.

It’s a fitting way to describe a project shaped, from architect through to interior designer, by two women who clearly admired each other’s work—Hromas herself calls it a “distinctly female presence,” expressed through strength rather than ornament.

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Inside, that same restraint gives way to warmth. Hromas layers a red cement floor—broken up by gridded glass mosaic thresholds that quietly track the family’s daily wear—against exposed LVL structure, a perforated steel stair, and a study clad in polished stainless steel designed to dissolve into reflected greenery rather than announce itself. In the kitchen, a silky oak island sits against Roma Blue quartzite and blue porcelain tiles laid with minimal grout. “Materials are chosen to deepen, mark and ripen with age,” Hromas explains—a pointed rejection of the short-cycle finishes so much of new residential work still leans on.

Heat pump radiant heating, solar PV and battery storage, extensive rainwater harvesting, a natural pool and carbon-neutral brick are all standard, but the central stair pulls double duty as a thermal labyrinth to cool the house through summer without air conditioning—though the bedrooms, Tribe admits, ended up getting it anyway.

The project has already picked up formal recognition, including a win in the Residential Design category at the 2026 Australian Interior Design Awards and a commendation at the AIA NSW Architecture Awards. But the win that matters most, by the sound of it, belongs to the family living in it. “Hannah designed our house to encourage closeness and creativity alongside privacy and functionality,” says the client. “Genevieve’s skill with interior materials is unusual; specific designs cast shadows in cool patterns, and rooms open up to let in breezes and the smells and sounds of nature. It’s simply beautiful.”