Dropping like an object from another world into Melbourne’s music scene for the first two weeks of May, the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) Quartetthaus is a concert space unlike any other you may have experienced.

Built into a 11m x 11m timber cube and made almost entirely of plywood, it seats just 52 patrons in two circles around a central, slowly revolving dais. At any one time, no one in the audience is more than two metres from the musicians they are listening to. It is akin to being inside an instrument itself, one of the most direct chamber music experiences one can imagine.

“You hear everything,” Quartetthaus designer Ben Cobham tells Limelight. “You hear these beautiful old instruments creak, you can hear the musicians’ breath, see the beads of sweat on their brows.”

The ANAM Quartetthaus. Photo © Pia Johnson

The idea for Quartetthaus didn’t arrive fully formed, he says. “Like a lot of what I do, it was more of a collision of experiences I’d had in the years before it.”

Conceptually, it owes something to works of theatre and dance Cobham worked on as a lighting designer, a...