The Hat Factory, built on Gadigal Land, has survived fire, police invasion, and countless parties... It's been a hat factory, a printers, a squat and a 'social-centre'. Now it enters a new phase of its life.
It has achieved a certain amount of notoriety. It features in the Australian Museum of Squatting; however, it has no formal heritage listing. From a public perspective, the Hat Factory is an important urban feature, acting as the western sentinel
to the locally listed Hollis Park. From a private perspective, our clients saw an opportunity to create a home with many layers –a contemporary house that could be adapted to suit their family of four as it grew and matured; that had a second residence, and all within a place mindful of its’ rich past.
With a site area of only 150 square metres, and built to the boundary on all 4 sides, 2 key decisions were made to claw back some sense of space and light. The first was to introduce a lightwell on the northern (rear) side. This gesture exposes the original sandstone retaining walls to create a lightwell across the rear of the building. This relieves the pressure that taking the building all the way to the boundary would have put on both the neighbours and the building itself. Combined with the treatment of the street (southern) wall, it also lets light into the building from 2 sides.
The easternmost dwelling faces Hollis Park. The building responds to the park with 2 new steel cartridges – one holds a large window to the living room and a screen to rooftop area; the larger one frames a hanging steel stair that connects the spaces within. This stair bookends the site with a mirror reverse version of serving the western dwelling. For both dwellings the ground and upper floors contain the bedrooms, with the living spaces suspended between on the mid- level. Polycarbonate and metal mesh walls filter southern light into the living spaces, a Kintsugi -like patch for the sections of walls that required removal. Graffiti from the Hat Factory’s squatting days has been retained – a reminder
of one layer of change the site has 4 of 7 seen from industrial building into residences. Those in-between years, where the site was an important part of the local social scene are remembered through these remnants, along with other signage from the building’s industrial past.
Some detailing is refined and deliberate – such as the stair and the eastern window; whilst other times it’s rudimentary, low skilled, and as required – the builders given no brief except to make it work. The Hat Factory unpicks the romantic ideal of living in a warehouse. It isn’t for everyone – the dwellings are permeable rather than hermetic – they are more like a pair of glass houses held within a masonry slipper than loft style apartment building. As vessels for knowledge, they retain memories of the past, at the same time offering a way to deliver compact, flexible urban living into the future.
