We often think about what makes a great client, and a great client is someone who
really understands who they are and what they want out of a project, and are able to articulate that
and these guys came with some really strong and interesting architectural reference points.
They really had a sense of the style and how they wanted to live.
Hi I'm Michael Roper, I'm a director at Architecture architecture and I'm Angus
Hamilton a project architect at Architecture architecture.
Welcome to Sunday.
We're in Fitzroy, in the heart of inner-urban Melbourne, pretty densely built up area.
Fitzroy is one of Melbourne's oldest suburbs, a lot of Victorian terraces,
workers cottages, like this one, you know very much an old suburb with all of its character.
They came to us with a really well written brief, that described the kinds of things that they like.
They'd lived here for a long time before and they knew what didn't work in the previous
house and how they wanted to sort of adjust and change that into this.
The house as we found it, is an old workers cottage and so you know typically you've got
a corridor down one side of the house and all the rooms coming off on the other side.
And now what you've got is this kind of open study space, slash guest quarters.
Bifold doors that really effectively close that
off and make it a private guest space when you want it to be.
Continuing on down the hall, you've got the guest bathroom
and it's got a great big window out onto the light court which is doing so much work.
Moving on through to the main part of the house,
you arrive in what is the kitchen-dining space and this is really the heart of the home.
We've
designed a sunken lounge just off the kitchen space and that's where we've used the yellow
through that, into the upholstery, into the carpet to give it that really great pop and
to bring, their, I think the client's personality into that space as well.
They had a real love of Luis Barragán's use of colour and particularly the bold yellow.
Really early on we put to the client this idea that their bedroom and ensuite would
be its own separate pavilion down the back of the site, and that you
would have to step outside from the main house in order to get to this pavilion.
The courtyard acts as another room, an outdoor room, which works incredibly
well with the garden and gives you a great connectiveness to the outside.
Yeah, it's a little bit of a jungle in the middle of the house.
Virginia grew up in a Paul Couch house,
which has a real affinity for this kind of robust material palette that we see.
And had a real interest in the work of Geoffrey Bawa
and that real kind of openness and breeziness.
So the kind of natural marriage point of those two ideas is you know the breeze
block that we see in this project, the guy who laid these blocks said to us that
he really loved them but he normally sees them in people's backyard gardens.
We liked using something which felt known and on the one hand readily available but
on the other hand may be used in a way that they typically wouldn't be.
It was good to work with Brickworks we enjoyed the process,
we looked at using a cavity brick system for the boundary walls,
there's a few benefits to that one of them being really great solidity along those boundaries.
We're only four shops away from a pub, we're not very far away from the major road and trams and
all that white noise gets cut out and you feel very much protected but then also obviously on
the internal side having the aesthetic that we were really striving for and that's one of the
best bits about the house I think, is when you come here you feel like you're in a sanctuary.
I think it was good to have a conversation about where we could potentially save some
money and Brickworks were good at helping us through that process
and giving us options as to what blocks were available and what their costs were
they were very transparent throughout that whole that whole process, which was great.
I really love the sense of tranquility that you get when you come through this space, it
has this great dynamic between the the kind of different types of living that
you can do here which I really like and whenever I come here I feel quite calm.
I think the thing that I'm most excited about for this house is just seeing
how it looks in 5, 10, 15, 20 years time I think it's going to hold up really well
I think the materials are going to age really nicely and just watching that garden take over
the central courtyard and really turn that into a little jungle something I'm really looking
forward to seeing if the clients will let us see it. If not I follow them on Instagram.