The site for this house is located in a leafy suburb five kilometres from Melbourne’s central business district. It spans two streets and has two frontages. An original Art Deco house, with an interesting add-on concrete structure to its rear, faced the main street. The client owned the property for many years and was strongly attached to the original house. Her brief was to refurbish it, providing two new bathrooms, and to demolish the concrete section at the rear, replacing it with a new addition containing an open plan living space.
Our objective was to design an addition that interrogated and responded to the Art Deco architecture of the original house and to advance it’s stylistic, spatial and visceral qualities. Formally, the structure of the new addition is conceived as a collection of sculptural roof forms oriented to provided outlook and sunlight to the interior as well as responding to the setback regulations of the local building code. Made from concrete with fine stucco finish and aluminium edging, the walls are pierced by large sheets of glass and high windows, establishing transparency and lightness to the form and a sensitive relationship with the future garden. A canopy sweeps outwards to create an exterior covered space where a large pivot door provides the entrance from the rear street.
On the inside, curved black and brown striped timber, traces the inside of sculptural roof elements and acts as a counterpoint to the white walls. Ceilings curve steeply upwards to create double-height spaces, and then fold down to provide intimate spaces. A linear element replicating the trunk of a tree extends the full width of the room incorporating the kitchen, unifying the successive elements of the space and establishing visual continuity towards the garden beyond.
