2816 Bates Rd, Torrington NSW 2371, Australia
Torrington, a small former hard-rock tin mining town in the NSW Northern Highlands, is today a quiet hamlet that still attracts fossickers searching for beautiful topaz, tourmaline and quartz crystals.
Torrington also houses a small architectural gem, a linear crystalline house designed and built by the Queensland architect Eddie Oribin in 1997, his seventieth year. Oribin is an astounding architect, best known for his earlier work in tropical Cairns, but also an inventor, pilot, musician, explorer and adventurer. After living in Stanthorpe for a decade, the raw beauty of Torrington’s granite-strewn landscape attracted Oribin to hand-build this house for himself and his wife Joyce in time for their fiftieth wedding anniversary.
The house is a genuine retreat, set back from the road, with only two doors to the exterior and no conventional windows visible. From the driveway there is an indirect arrival sequence, along carefully fashioned timber paths, between granite outcrops to the southern balcony.
Doors lead into the very internalised dining and kitchen spaces. The battened ceiling volume drops to a long, low, angled bay where a vertical side wall would normally have been expected. This lowered space transforms abruptly into a steeply gabled central living room; a space flooded with light on both sides from north- and south- facing clerestory windows. From this six metre high volume the roof and ceiling drops again as one moves through the bath and dressing spaces to the spacious bedroom, returning to the polygonal form of the southern rooms. The bedroom leads out into a small northern solarium shaped like tube in order to catch the winter sun from dawn to dusk.
