ABOUT US
Walter Barda Design has been based in Sydney since 1987, offering consultancy services in planning, architecture, landscape and interior design. Our diverse portfolio of work demonstrates a capability to deliver projects of the highest quality but also incorporating a unique sense of art form into each opportunity.
The Director, Walter Barda, is personally involved in the design and detail of each project, bringing an inventive approach to the built work. As a regularly exhibiting visual artist, Walter has held exhibitions across Eastern Australia. His work is held in numerous private and public collections. With this background, the expression of architecture as an art form is a natural goal for the practice. The use of sophisticated three-dimensional modelling software enables complex, sculptural ideas to be realised by the office team.
Within Sydney’ s Northern Beaches and Eastern Suburbs alone, Walter Barda Design has produced over 50 innovative residences, receiving many design awards for our creative contribution to the built environment. Discerning clients from areas of business, entertainment and the arts have sought out the unique product we offer. Further afield, significant commercial projects include the Hungerford Hill Winery at Pokolbin, Observatory Tower in Sydney’s CBD, Kogarah Aesthetic Day Surgery, Hamilton Island Yacht Club and Villas in Queensland, and the Tower Estate Resort Villas in The Hunter Valley. Walter was collaboratively involved with the Federation Pavilion in Sydney’s Centennial park (Landscape Design) and the Australian Hellenic Memorial in Canberra. The practice regularly engages in architectural competitions both nationally and internationally.
P A V I L I O N S
These explore the vernacular tradition of timber-framed buildings, often in cluster and courtyard form, each project evolving in the details from earlier work, but sharing a core idea for the house as a permeable, flexible interface between indoors and outdoors, as a series of linked pavilions, integrating garden settings within the experience of dwelling house form. In every case the garden and dwelling are conceived as one continuum, drawing the site in its entirety and beyond into the overall composition.
A S S E M B L A G E S
The building form evolves as an accumulation of sculptural elements, often referencing an association or memory connecting the project with its past or a theme relating to its setting or functional origin. The resulting lyricism lends a narrative aspect to the experience of a place. The tectonic possibilities of masonry construction deliver ‘carved’ space, grounding the buildings often as a setting for rhythmic ‘groves’ of timber columns and screens. The idea of “caves and trees” is a recurring motif. Also common, is the importance of a pivotal, ‘great space’ ordering and generating a hierarchy of scale to accommodate the transitions between larger gatherings and intimate seclusions. The celebration of building craft is seen in the bespoke workings of timber, stone, copper, and the interplay of textures, shifting between rough-cast rendered surfaces, to the refinement of polished joinery timbers and waxed plaster.