STORY BY MAHMOOD FAZAL, PHOTOS BY CHRIS TURNER

Local architect, Darren Carnell is working from a studio set up in an old potting shed in his backyard. ”It’s an old potting chimney converter,” he explains, “I bought a house in Daylesford around 2011. It started off just weekends, and four years later I was up here five days a week and two days in Richmond.”

It was during the 2010 AFL grand final, while staying at the Lakehouse, that Darren and his wife Sharon fell under Daylesford’s spell. “If you remember, the game ended in a draw. So I looked at my wife and said, ‘what are we going to do?’ and she said, ‘well, I think we’ll have to come up next weekend.” Driving out of town, they noticed a house for sale by the Uniting Church. They put in an offer and moved in within a couple of weeks. 

“It’s an 1894 Victorian house that leaks like a sieve. And when we first looked at it, it had a typical Federation Green and Red roof. We saw some potential in it so we set about pulling up the garden, changed the roof and completely renovated the outside.” Darren recalls, “It was nice to have a project that could be done on weekends, and so we worked on the garden and fully hedged it.”

Darren grew up in Eltham. After a career in Drafting, he decided he wanted to become an architect. After being unsuccessful in his admission the first year, the following year he returned with a book, a piece of bamboo and a sketch of the fireplace that he was designing. “And I was in,” laughs Darren.

Since launching his own firm in 1998, Darren Carnell Architects has established a portfolio of built work across various fields - such as education, recreation, commercial, industrial and exclusive private homes.

“I’ve learned a lot about communication. Primarily what we do is about communicating design. I love its connection with art and its connection with people,” says Darren. “We've got two houses up here in Daylesford which are in the final stages of completion. To build a house that will take a year to design and a year-and-a-half to build you need to know people; you need to know their personalities, you need to know their likes, their families and their idiosyncrasies.”

Since moving, Darren’s quickly become embedded into the fabric of Daylesford, his son Matthew Carnell opened up the French restaurant Bistro Terroir on Howe street, after working at a Michelin two-star restaurant in France, and his daughter Lisa Carnell works for the firm as an interior designer. 

“When Matthew was in the savoir we visited him with Lisa and I said, why don’t we have a look at Ronchamp.” It was there, while standing inside Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame du Haut, a chapel described as one of the 20th Century’s most important buildings. “The two of us drove four and a half hours there and four and a half hours back. And it was a cathartic moment for both of us, you know, standing there - the sense of space and the sense of light. It's just such an organic building.”

For Darren, Architecture has a transformational quality that changes the way inhabitants engage their communities. “There are some spaces that simply make you emotional,” he asserts, “There’s nothing like getting that tingle. I love being in those sorts of spaces. There’s just something about proportion, scale and light that affects your soul.”

Darren Carnell Architects                                                                                                                                      

9425 9255                                                                                       

info@dc-a.com.au                                                                               

dc-a.com.au