The initial brief was to create a home to suit the needs for a young growing family, with a seamlessness between the interior and exterior living zones that suits Sydney’s balanced climate.
When the client purchased the house, it was in a poor state, suffering at the hands of a bad seventies make-over with its historical features having been removed and generally poor planning throughout. The north facing aspect was not optimized, neither was the connection to the backyard on the north side. The living space in the original home was on the upper level with an unusable deck.
Our intent was to reconfigure the planning so that the primary internal living area directly connected to the backyard, which literally serves as an extension to the living space. The rear yard was made more practical with respect to how it was used. It was previously a sequence of small paved areas separated by changes in ground levels, whereas the new layout attempts to optimise the site’s width and open the space up. A new garage was added, with a storage basement below and self-contained guest studio above, bookending the property from the rear service lane.
The first challenge was the existing building’s heritage listing. Our approach was to respect the existing fabric that was worth keeping and work around the heritage elements and contrast them with contemporary elements to create an interesting dialogue.
We restored the street frontage of the three-storey terrace house and reverted the surplus space on its western side from being external to internal — a simple gesture that has transformed the entire home, with the result that all of the existing rooms are able to open up to and connect to this thin but tall zone. A new wall that abuts the neighbour’s house was built. It is effectively a concrete block wall that serves as structural support within the house, which was then clad with vertical timber planks. This void was given a glazed roof and glazed ends, creating a transparent versus a solid approach that does not compete with the original terrace home. The original side wall of the house was then penetrated to permit the bedrooms, the main stair and the bathrooms access to natural light, creating a skinny three-storey void that nearly all the rooms connect into.
The main stair is a good example of the void’s capacity to bring light into what would otherwise be the darkest space in the home. The stair is new and it runs perpendicular to its predecessor. Given most terrace homes are deprived in their width, the intent here was to make each level feel as wide as possible, so in turning the stair 90°, we were able to save on the space needed to circulate around a stair. In this respect the stair space is almost like a room with no end walls such that moving up through the building the inhabitant literally touches the tall skinny western void.
The ensuite also penetrates through the original brick wall, with the bath actually being suspended up within the void. This created a bath with a view and yet remarkable privacy due to its height on the top floor. The marble is Calacutta that is ‘stratico’ bookmatched in profile and mitred where possible to create an illusion that the bathroom could have been carved from a solid block of the stone.
Our philosophy with the glazing is to adopt a black frame, which has the effect of allowing the eye to travel past the frame to something beyond. The result is that interior spaces can feel larger as their apparent boundary is beyond the room’s actual footprint. The owners wanted to break the glazing down into smaller panes, which we agreed with given the conservation zone. Smaller windows are a distinct characteristic of a lot of the original buildings in the Paddington precinct.
The intent behind the joinery and colour palette was to create a neutral palette with large sources of warmth provided in the floor and western wall both being timber. The black stained joinery in the centre of the plan was given a contrasting material to create the illusion that it could be a piece of furniture simply dropped into the home. The reality is that it conceals kitchen functions plus the structural walls required to hold the house up. Deeper into the plan it becomes the stair. The floor is an engineered floorboard made from oak with a limed finish.
