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MUUNMA STUDIO

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WELCOME



MUUNMA Studio is an emerging architecture and design practice by Luke Grey based in Newcastle, Australia.

Architecture should not be understood as an object, but as an active system for everyday life—found in the built details, relationships, and atmospheres that shape our daily habits, movements, and moods. In response, MUUNMA designs beautiful and functional architecture that offers people both the ambition to live differently, and the freedom to live well.

MUUNMA Studio creates thoughtful, characterful architecture that responds directly to the unique opportunities of a site’s context and surrounding landscape, tailored by the idiosyncrasies and personalities of those who will inhabit it. Working with MUUNMA is an engaged process, with time taken to understand how you live and work to develop a design that fits your lifestyle, site, and budget.

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MUUNMA Studio respectfully acknowledges the Awabakal and Worrimi peoples as the Traditional Custodians of Muloobinba (Newcastle) and recognise their continuing custodianship its land, waters and culture. As architects, it is incumbent on us to value all development—on land which was never ceded—as a privileged and serious responsibility to care for Country.

Reach Out
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CONTACT



Get in touch with MUUNMA Studio to discuss your upcoming project. Whether you are starting something new, revitalising an existing space—or simply exploring ideas—all enquiries are welcomed. 


MUUNMA Studio
ABN 99 919 108 112

Luke Grey, Architect
NSW ARB 12295

@muunma.studio0425 112 655studio@muunma.com







Alts + Adds
01

A HOUSE THAT’S A DECK


Location
Client
Status Awabakal Country, Carrington
Family of four
Under construction


An unsympathetic addition is sloughed from the over 100-year-old cottage, allowing the structure and its inhabitants to breathe. Original building fabric is repaired, harvested and recycled in the new addition, prioritising light and external connections on the tight and overshadowed site.

The clients and their two young boys—against convention—wanted to downsize from a larger family home, with the intention to live with less and focus on an outdoor lifestyle. In response, the design simply became a big deck that forms both the external and interior spaces of the new addition. An architectural roof feature draws light in from the north, and the narrow southern side entry is made into a hard-working ‘corridor’ that holds a bike shed, bin storage, outdoor shower, garden and living room break-out deck.

The construction-esque aesthetic stems from a desire that the house be honest and robust. The exposure of things normally hidden imbues a unique beauty and functionality to them. From recycled hardwood studs in the walls, to the site-made joinery, an appreciation of craftsmanship (built by the client’s father) becomes part of the ethic in daily life lived there.












Photography
Builder
Landscape
Engineer





Ash Sorensen
Guy Sorensen Builder
Wattlebird Garden Design
Skelton Consulting Engineers Completed while at Curious Practice as project architect.
Public Art
02

UNDERTOW


Location
Client
Year Worrimi Country, Barrington
MidCoast Council
2022


Selected and developed as one of the first two permanent works for the Barrington Coast Art Trail, Undertow is a sculpture that responds to a brief for artworks which tell the stories of local community, flora and fauna. The design challenged the expected format of a painted mural with a novel installation that responds dynamically to the touch of visitors and changing conditions of the site.

The patina of the concrete is left raw to provide a rich background for the new totems. Cicadas represent the observable, cyclical movements in life. They wait, rusting orange, to be discovered as their amber shells might be. Each wing is perforated with a unique set of contours from the communities and landscape surrounding the work. Above them, stars render the unfathomable movements of the cosmos; distance hiding the violent reality of their beauty.

Divining the constellations of our own stories—be they stars, cicadas or the patterns of places we come from—grants them an authenticity and permanence within us. Undertow presents a personal story, but offers a universal narrative to those who relate with the work.












Artist
Photography





Luke Grey
Alex McIntyre Completed while at Curious Practice as project architect.
“Ever since I was a child I’ve collected things: pebbles, shells from the rocks of Abruzzi, strands of wire, little screws. While I was still very young I remember something momentous happened in the form of a chicken my mother was preparing for our Sunday roast. In its stomach was a collection of glass and pebbles worn smooth by water, in shades of green, pink, black, brown and white. My mother gave them to me, and that was the start of my collection, which I kept in a little powder compact, a present from my Aunt Esterina, made from the blue steel of German guns abandoned after France’s victory in the First World War. I was six years old.” (Lina Bo Bardi)

“Taking architecture seriously ... means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread ... More awkwardly still, architecture asks us to imagine that happiness might often have an unostentatious, unheroic character to it, that it might be found in a run of old floorboards or in a wash of morning light over a plaster wall - in undramatic, frangible scenes of beauty that move us because we are aware of the darker backdrop against which they are set.” (Alain de Botton)
“Living and architecture enjoy in Australia a curious, close relationship. Where else can one start a word association game with ‘architecture’, assured that the response will be, not ‘building’ or ‘city’ or ‘monument’, but ‘home’? What is more remarkable is this: if the prompting word in the game is changed to ‘living’, a high proportion of the responses will be the same word: ‘home’ … where they sleep and eat and rear children and watch telly and make cakes, tea and love—in private. So architecture and living are linked by home.” (Robin Boyd)
































The name MUUNMA is an amalgam of Mum and Una, two women whose love, care and intellect provide the basis for all the work I do.









@muunma.studio0425 112 655studio@muunma.com
Luke Grey ©