The Family Tree House is a set of architectural interventions grafted onto a remnant coastal character house.
There is a family lineage to the house, it has been our Client’s Grandmother’s place and in turn his mother’s home. At its core was a humble one-bedroom hardwood framed cottage with an enclosed verandah wrapping along its eastern and northern edges. Accompanying and protecting the house is a colossal Weeping Fig planted generations ago, it has been climbed by our Client and his siblings as children and his own 3 boys whilst the family gathered beneath its boughs in the coolth of its shade.
Our site strategy is one of respect and retention, with the architecture aspiring to connect the histories existing within the Site - past, present and future. Retention of built form and adaptive reuse is a highly sustainable act, equally it provides a platform for cultural continuity within communities and the valuing the living memories stored within our homes.
The brief required a reworking of the 1960’s asbestos riddled rear extensions; kitchen and bathroom and side garage and the provision of flexible spaces to accommodate visiting family. It was an immediate consideration that the various ages of the house remained recognisable and intact. We identified with the work of Frank Gehry, in his own home at Santa Monica, in particular his intention to “interact sculpturally with the existing object allowing it to retain its original identity whilst entertaining entirely new additions”.
The modest plans oblige an underlying conceptual tartan grid. We identified a series of linear ‘streets’ which traverse the plan in both axes, extending out into the landscape, in an action of warp and weft, defining space and a series of solid objects or ‘boxes’ which contain the private or service program. The resultant pattern is reminiscent of a Piet Mondrian painting.
The gravitas of the Tree was allowed to polarised the plan, re-orientating rooms away from their traditional obligations to the street (east) and turning instead to face west into the backyard. A single ‘Sliding Wall’ stacking beyond the plan, removes any barrier between the interior and the courtyard. The finite interiors swelling to meet the infinite scale of the Tree.
The entertaining deck is perched above the new additions on the ‘leeside’ of the house in preference to the North-East corner. A seemingly counterintuitive move, this placement draws in the treasured long-view to the coastline as well as embedding the space into the canopy reinforcing the symbiotic relationship between house and tree.
The expression of tectonics is ingrained in our approach to making architectural space. This project illustrates our ongoing investigation into ‘frame’ as both a construction system and architectural device. Family Tree House seeks to maintain local building craft and techniques by providing a direct engagement with inherited knowledge of timber assembly. It is one of the contentions of our Practice that how we make architecture is tantamount to the idea, the experience0 or resultant form.
