Our clients, a semi-retired couple, one an established artist, presented Us with a curious proposition; to downsize from their substantial Queenslander family home to a new house placed immediately next door on the site of their lawn tennis court.
We intuitively understood, identifying the found site within the existing site, implied a desire not to severe existing relationships to the street, neighbours and the original house. Our intention was to provide continuity to the memories of place for the family through the intervention of the new architecture and its relationships to the history of the site.
A formative idea was to map the available light entering the small lot. We then painted the plan and section with a palette of light and translucency in mind. We referenced a painting by Paul Klee [Polyphon Gefasstes Weiss, 1930) to illustrate this methodology. Program requiring immediacy to natural /winter light was given priority to the north-east then graduated progressively through the plan. This process inverted the living areas away from the street as conventionally expected, re-orientating the key rooms around the light pocket courtyard and kitchen void to the rear.
The master bedroom and verandah hang above the street, an external curtain providing privacy. A series of perforated screens flank the house along each of the eastern and western elevations which sieve and breakdown the intense light simultaneously presenting pixelated silhouettes of the original house.
Roofs are a significant focus of our Practice’s work. We have found that despite the cultural weight of identity the iconic roof forms carry within our City, the experience of the roof is generally absent within houses themselves. The extruded gable form at Floating Gable House references and manipulates the dominant form of the surrounding vernacular architecture and the original twin gabled house. The open framed pitched gable is intended as an integral detail and presence within the interior of Floating Gable House, binding the communal and private living spaces. It is inspired in part by the physical and social structures of the Asia Pacific longhouse typology and the notion of ‘lives lived shared under one roof’. Maintaining the visual continuity of the roof as a singular entity over the plan informed the detailing of a series of openable plywood carriages of space which link to form an open plan arrangement on the upper platform.
Landscape connects the house to the Site. There is a garden which greets you at the street replete with a gatehouse termination to the pre-existing tennis court fences which were retained at the periphery of the Site and repurposed to support a drapery screen of greenery. The elongated plan leads through to central courtyard and beyond lies a traditional backyard.
A significant palimpsest within the Brisbane lot is an historic concrete barrel-vaulted bomb shelter. We cast our own adjacent off-form garden structure intended as a long-term companion; a grounded art studio top-lit by a polycarbonate lightbox to create an ambient atelier for the permanent artist in residence.
