Yeo Yo by Archaea Architects
Behind the retained shell of a modest 1925 bungalow, Yeo Yo unfolds as an interior of colour, crafted material, and shaped light.
Designed by Archaea Architects, the Adelaide residence takes its name from a playful exchange between client and architect, merging street name, a child’s toy, and the architect’s Spanish heritage and delivers on its brief for “something bold” through discipline rather than excess.
Geometry in Motion
The addition emerges behind the original house as a sequence of curved forms arranged around a circular internal garden. Rather than terminating at the garden, circulation wraps around it, creating a continuous spatial loop that draws light and landscape deep into the plan. This circular logic is not decorative, it is structural to how the house is experienced, shaping how spaces connect, how sightlines extend, and how daily movement is oriented around a living centre.
The gesture reaches its most ambitious expression in the living area, where a Catalan-inspired brick barrel vault rises to 5.6 metres. Adelaide’s first modern example of the form, the vault is constructed in dry-pressed brick, its geometry capturing the arc of the northern sun. During the day, light rakes across the brickwork, revealing variation in texture and depth. At night, concealed lighting along the steel lintel diffuses a low atmospheric glow around the curve, transforming the same surface into something intimate and still.
A Layered Material World
Colour is used with conviction throughout. White surfaces are kept to a minimum. A continuous microcement floor in soft beige grounds the interior, while timber joinery, pink cabinetry, and lime-based paint in deep greens and warm neutrals establish distinct identities for each room. The yoga room is colour-blocked in forest green. The ensuite takes its tonal cues from Barragán — richly saturated, daylit through a frameless skylight. Terrazzo, terracotta, and hand-selected palladiana stone introduce pattern and tactility, culminating in an organic kitchen benchtop shaped collaboratively by client and architect. Skirtings and architraves are removed throughout, allowing surfaces to read as uninterrupted planes, amplifying each shift in colour and material.
Defining Features
Within this considered material landscape, Bankston hardware was specified to carry the project’s circular vocabulary through to its most tactile layer, selected for the way the form of the Pull 03 echoes the project’s recurring circular geometry. Where the barrel vault and curved steel doors establish the architecture’s expressive register, the hardware continues that conversation at the scale of the hand, resolved in form, precise in finish, and consistent with the broader material palette.
Custom mint-green steel doors are punctuated by the Lever 01’s in Bronze, acting as the home’s initial visual markers and tactile objects. In the joinery-lined office and the brass-detailed master bedroom alike, Bankston’s presence is measured and deliberate, anchoring each space without interrupting its character.
Tactile Continuity
Yeo Yo is a home that rewards close attention. Its boldness is not loud — it is accumulated through material choice, spatial sequence, and the careful resolution of every detail. Bankston hardware participates in this logic: providing the connective thread that runs from the scale of the vault to the scale of a fingertip, ensuring that the project’s expressive ambitions are felt as much as seen.
