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The glass bridge is clearly how the project was named and is I guess the hero of the project.
You are traversing on a glass floor, and what we find wonderful about that is that you get a view
down into the manicured garden. We have loved the fact that the client's child Lucy spends
hours and hours looking at the goldfish below, and in a sense, it's become her playground.
My name is Matt Gibson from Matt Gibson Architecture and Design,
we're the architects and interior designers on this wonderful family home.
The house is located within the South Fitzroy heritage precinct, which is one of Melbourne's
oldest heritage areas. We're literally two kilometres from the CBD within a five-minute walk.
The site is a long thin site, a typical terrace house site.
This one in particular is five and a half metres wide by 45 meters long, so incredibly long.
The original building is one of a row of four, and it was built in 1852,
so right in the heart of the gold rush. The house is in a heritage overlay,
which means you can't amend the front two rooms of the house externally.
As you enter from the street, you move through the victorian environs and on
the left you have the enclosed sitting room if you like or the drawing room.
It's depicted in a dark hue that is reminiscent of victorian times,
as you move through into the second room, which is the dining room you meet the courtyard and at
this point there's kind of a dissolution if you like of interior and exterior.
The doors all slide away into cavities, there's a flush threshold between
inside floor and outside floor, and it almost feels like inside and outside dissolves.
It gives a wonderful flexibility through the seasons to open up or close down the home.
Above you is the bridge, a glass-bottomed
circulation route between the pavilions which is pretty exciting.
And then one moves through the kitchen and into what we refer to as a breakfast courtyard,
and the timber from inside, the Australian hardwood runs inside-outside again,
dissolving that threshold between interior and exterior.
The rear pavilion is clad in timber, and in a sense, we think of it as a
landscape element almost not architecture, but something that the roof garden and plants
overhang and the timber in time will actually grey off and be in sync with the landscape.
We love the way that you enter around the back of the poncet, to go up the stairs
and kind of connect with the exterior brickwork of the building, which are reflective of some
of the laneway architecture within Fitzroy and then you come up to the retreat at the rear.
The client was very involved in the project which we love, and in this case,
there was a particular non-negotiable, which was having a very tranquil Asian-inspired courtyard.
We've been so lucky to do that incredibly well with the help of Robyn Barlow,
she is a landscape designer that we use on several of our projects
and there was a great collaborative process of melding architecture with landscape.
An often used heritage approach is to connect a new building onto the old building and to create
a difference between old and new. In this case, we separated the buildings, but wanted to keep a
level of self-similarity between the buildings, so the key sustainable move I guess is the use
of the recycled brick. All bricks that came out of the home were used within the new building,
it means low embodied energy, but it also means that the new buildings have come intrinsically
out of the old, and from a contextual point of view that's terribly important.
We've ensured that we're maximizing northern solar aspect into those courtyards,
and we've also done a series of skylights, some are within the gardens and then others
are at specific areas bringing light into, for example, the master ensuite or above the lounge
area where there is a curtain that curves behind the curved skylight.
The staircase is custom designed out of steel, similar to some of the other curved
elements of the house, which there are many. We decided to put a little sculptural twirl on
the end of the staircase, another bespoke element within the house.
The cellar came about late in the design process, it started off as a small existing cellar that
was going to be decked out, in the end, the client decided they required more storage but
also wanted to have a quaffing area downstairs and it's a lovely get away from the rest of the house.
The thing I'm most proud about is this is a wonderfully warm and textural and inviting
family home, it's so unique to this particular client
and the fact that they were actually so involved in the creation of it
means that they retell that story to their friends and get ultimate enjoyment out of it.
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