Bite Magazine

20
Your business
Design
Article Rob Johnson
Photography Simon Wood Photography
Underwater love
When patients see calming vision of fish rolling through coral during their surgery at
Macquarie Street’s Dental Lounge, it’s not the painkillers kicking in
ompeting with a view in Sydney is
pretty difficult. Competing with a
view of the city’s botanic gardens
is nigh impossible. But that’s what
Drs Mark Braund and Daniel Adamo of Dental Lounge wanted to
do—find something that competed
with their surgery’s million-dollar
view over Macquarie Street. They
discussed it with their architect,
Joshua Mulder of JM Architects, and came up with a somewhat surreal solution—fish.
“The suites in this building are all quite small, and there’s
16 in the whole building,” explains Daniel Adamo. “We’ve
got one that looks over the Botanical Gardens, and has
a beautiful view. Most of the rest of the suites are owned
by the College of Physicians, and they’ve owned for years
and years, and they rarely come up for sale. However,
recently the one out the back of ours became available, so
we bought it. Unlike our existing suites, the back one had
no view, so we had to come up with something that could
compete, something that made it special in and of itself.”
Problem was, they’d pretty much reached the limits of
their own design abilities with the front suite. “We did the
build of the front suite ourselves, but we couldn’t really
much it up because that view was so good, no matter what
we did it would always be fine,” says Adamo. They tossed
a few ideas around, then approached Joshua Mulder and
asked him to come up with a design that looked good and
accommodated three chairs and a steri room.
“Mark [Braund] came up with the aquarium idea, but only
as a suggestion, then Josh just ran with it,” says Adamo.
“Mark [Braund] came up with
the aquarium idea, but only as
a suggestion, then Josh just ran
with it.”
Dr Daniel Adamo of Dental Lounge
“His design was nothing like what we conceived.”
Mulder saw the request for an aquarium as an opportunity
to take things “to the max”.
“We came up with a concept that divided the main entry
from other treatment rooms by having a continuous aquarium wall running down the length of the practice, to maximise the experience,” he says.
But of course, nothing is ever that easy.
“The biggest challenge we needed to get our head
around was the issues you face when working with an older
building, and with predominantly concrete walls,” says
What can compete with a
view of the Botanical Gardens? Fish, of course.
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22 Bite
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stylish, fully-customised practice that
Mulder. Those old Deco buildings look wonderful, but aren’t
actually designed to be carrying around large aquariums.
“The biggest factor was the weight of the tanks,” he continues. “The structure had to take the weight, and the tanks
needed to be matched. So the challenge was to still get
that wow factor while being mindful of those constraints.
We initially thought of doing floor to ceiling tanks, but just
through the nature of the construction and the weight, we
were restricted to the strip through the centre. Together
with the natural space constraints—the suites are quite
small—the tank size had to be a certain thickness too,
which impacted on the size we had to work with.”
For every litre of water in the tanks, the weight would
be one kilogram, which made the combined weight of the
tanks more than a tonne. At that weight, the tanks had to
be supported on a subframe, which then presented the
challenge of levelling everything off accurately. “It’s a lot of
weight in a relatively small area,” says Mulder. That wasn’t
the only problem: The suites were five levels up. There
was only one lift you could bring things up in. So the tanks
couldn’t be manufactured off site and carried up—they had
to arrive in pieces that would fit in the lift, or be ale to be
carried up the stairs.
“When we originally spoke with the aquarium guys, we
asked them what’s the biggest tank we can get up in this
space?” Mulder recalls. “They said we can do two and a
half metres long by a metre high. At that point they were
thinking they could get it up in the lift. Then they tried it and
said no, we can’t. So they walked one piece of glass up
the stairs, and the others had to be cut down to be bought
up in the lift. The number of cuts were determined by the
fact that you couldn’t have too many joins in the glass or it
wouldn’t be as aesthetically pleasing. So it was a challenge
getting the glass up there.”
Rather than one continuous aquarium, the solution Mulder created involved three aquariums set into a glass wall.
“The aquariums are set up at eye-level,” he explains, “so
you’re walking between each one into the treatment rooms.
Above and below is all glass, then it has a film of glass with
an image printed on that so it looks like a water wall.”
T
he original floor presented the builders with
problems, but with opportunities to continue the
‘aquarium’ theme: “We found the timber floor
was raised on batons, and we had problems
getting flush transitions from inside to outside,”
Mulder explains. “We needed to raise the floor as well, using materials which were a bit more tactile and warm, which
almost gives the impression of a sandy beach. So it really
had a theme of the full experience of being in water.”
From the point of view of the owners, the whole experience was quite a pleasant one: business in the suites continued as normal for the course of the build, says Adamo,
and while he remembers things may have gone slightly
over-time and budget, it was all controlled by Mulder. And
the end result is quite spectacular.
“The aquarium is double-sided, so when you walk past, if
you looked really hard, you could see through the wall into
the treatment rooms,” Adamo says. “Of course, you don’t
have a clear vision to do that—there’s plenty of distractions
in the way, like plants and fish. We actually had the first day
of using it recently, and we’re planning an opening party for
some time this month. The people we’ve taken up there to
take a look say it’s amazing.” £
makes your business work, now and into
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Mark
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Ph 9655 1919 • www.commodorejoinery.com.au
design and construction of dental
The biggest factor affecting
the design was the weight of
the fish tanks, says Mulder.
Bite 23