Embrace Architects Wraps a Three-Level Kew House in Curved Render, Bronze Arches and Arched Glazing

Thomas Residence, also published as Thomas Street House, is a three-level private home in Kew, one of Melbourne's established and heavily treed eastern suburbs. Embrace Architects completed it in 2025, with Max Waters and Nicholas Sun as lead architects and Shabnam Baharaini as design architect. At 1070 m², this is not a modest family house. It sits firmly in the territory of the large Melbourne villa, where the risk is usually excess and the reward, when it works, is a house with real spatial control.

What makes the project worth studying is its discipline. The architects describe their aims as proportion, light, curved geometry and lasting materials, framed as refined minimalism with "contemporary classical rhythms." In practice, the house runs almost entirely on one idea: the arch, plus its close relatives the circle and the rounded corner. That vocabulary carries through the street front, the hallways, the joinery and the bathrooms. You can argue about whether the language is too consistent, but you cannot accuse it of being incoherent.

A Street Front Built from Circles and Arches

The street elevation reads as a composition of punctures in pale render: round windows, arched openings and arched garage doors, all with dark frames that sharpen the geometry against the wall. The garage is the part we find most telling. On a house this size, the vehicle entry could easily have taken over the frontage. Here it is absorbed into the same arched rhythm as the windows, so it reads as part of the facade rather than a utility interruption.

The entry is the strongest single move on the site. Three freestanding bronze arches step over a stone path between planted beds, creating a threshold before you reach the door. At dusk, with low lights in the garden and a round window glowing above, the arches become a small processional gateway. It is a classical device, the colonnade reduced to its outline, and it does more for the arrival sequence than any canopy would.

Curved Render as the Primary Material

Seen from the side and from below, the house is less a box with rounded edges than a series of curved planes. The walls bend around corners, round-topped windows sit inside them, and dark vertical fins break up the white surface. Those fins matter: without them, the curved render could look soft and undefined. With them, the elevation gains a vertical measure, and the curves read as intended rather than accidental.

The planted terrace edge and the red brick neighbour visible next door show the house's relationship to Kew. It does not imitate the brick and tile around it, but it also avoids the hard-edged glass block common in new Melbourne houses. Pale, curved and partly screened by trees, it settles into the leafy street more quietly than its floor area suggests.

Arches as Interior Circulation

Inside, the arch moves from facade motif to spatial organiser. A hallway becomes an enfilade of plaster arches over chevron timber flooring, with glazing on one side and tall cabinetry on the other. This is the clearest expression of the "classical rhythm" the architects talk about: repeated frames set the pace of movement through a long passage, the way a nave or a gallery does.

The vertical circulation is just as deliberate. The house is organised around a central core linking its three levels, and the stair receives some of the most careful detailing in the project. A zigzag cutout in the plastered wall holds a recessed handrail lit by a thin LED strip, so the rail disappears into the wall rather than sitting on it. It is a small detail, but it shows the restraint the house needs: so much curvature only works if the secondary elements stay out of the way.

Kitchen and Dining Facing the Garden

The kitchen holds back on the curves. A stone-clad island and tall cabinetry give it a straight-edged backbone, and the arch appears once, as a fluted-glass window between the cabinets. That pairing of a rectilinear working room with a single arched opening is a sensible call. Kitchens need flat surfaces and plumb walls, and the design lets them have both.

The dining room is where the arched glazing earns its place. A curved plaster wall meets an arched glazed door, and through it you see the garden and, beyond that, the houses across the street. The views are framed rather than total, and that keeps a sense of enclosure that a full-height glass wall would lose. Where curved plaster meets the dark window frames, the junctions are crisp, which is the hardest thing to get right in a house built on this geometry.

Hearths, Shelves and a Bar

The living spaces are anchored by low, linear gas fireplaces set into curved plaster walls, one with stepped stone shelves cut into the surface. Built-in shelving follows the curves, so the furniture-scale joinery and the architecture share one language. The tufted modular sofa and sheer curtains keep the palette soft, maybe too soft in places, but the effect is calm rather than showy.

The bar is the one room that leans into richness. Veined green and grey marble and backlit bottle shelving give it a heavier, more theatrical character than the rest of the house. As a contrast it works. A house this pale and this disciplined benefits from one room that is allowed to be dark and indulgent.

Private Rooms on the Upper Level

Upstairs, balconies with frosted glass balustrades and round columns give the bedrooms outdoor edges while screening them from the street. The column is a recurring element across the house, appearing at the pool terrace and in the bathrooms, and it reinforces the classical reading without becoming decorative pastiche.

The bedroom and study are furnished in a darker key: a black four-poster bed, a black oval desk in front of arched built-in shelves. Those dark objects against white plaster read almost like ink on paper, and they give the private rooms a stronger character than the more neutral living areas downstairs.

Bathrooms as Plaster Grottos

The bathrooms are where the curved geometry makes the most sense. A freestanding round bathtub sits in a curved plaster room with a terrazzo floor, lit from above by an oval skylight. With no corners to collect shadow, light moves evenly across the walls, and the room feels carved rather than assembled.

Fittings, with Brodware listed as manufacturer, follow the same logic: a freestanding white basin under a thin droplet-shaped tap, a dark metal bath mixer catching a sunlit arch on the wall, and an arched niche with warm backlighting beside a plaster column. These are rooms designed around how light falls, and they are among the most convincing spaces in the house.

Pool Terrace and Wellness

Outside, a curved rendered wall and a slender round column frame a tiled pool terrace, carrying the house's language into the garden. Inside, a mosaic-tiled steam room with a curved bench and a glowing strip of light below the seat repeats the logic at a smaller, more intimate scale.

Together these spaces show the program behind the floor area: this is a house built for leisure as much as for living, with a bar, pool, steam room and multiple fireplaces. The architecture's job is to keep that program from feeling like a resort brochure, and the consistent curved vocabulary mostly does that.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings confirm what the photographs suggest. The house runs over a basement, ground floor and first floor, topped by a roof terrace, and the rounded corners appear in plan as well as on the facade. The exploded axonometric makes the stacking clear, with the central core holding the levels together and the program spread across distinct but connected rooms.

The section is worth reading alongside the plans because it explains how a 1070 m² house manages to present a relatively contained street front. A significant share of the program goes below ground, which takes pressure off the visible mass and helps the house sit within its leafy suburban setting.

Why This Project Matters

Arches and curves have become a familiar shorthand in residential design over the past decade, often applied as surface styling on otherwise conventional houses. Thomas Residence is a more serious use of the language. The arch organises circulation, frames views, sets proportion and shapes how light enters rooms. That is the gap between a motif and a system, and it is the main reason the house holds together.

There are fair questions to ask about scale and about how much softness a house can carry before it turns precious. But as a case study in committing to one geometric idea and carrying it from street gate to shower niche, the project is instructive. For anyone designing large houses in established suburbs, it shows that restraint in vocabulary can do more than variety, and that a big house can still read as composed.

Thomas Residence (Thomas Street House) by Embrace Architects. Location: Kew, Melbourne, Australia. Area: 1070 m². Year: 2025. Photography: Charlotte Jane.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.