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I'm David Burton, I'm a director of Williams Burton Leopardi,
Sophia Leopardi also a director at Williams Burton Leopardi and this is the North Adelaide Residence.
It's a cottage on the parklands of North Adelaide, it faces a reasonably unique
situation where it's in a row of substantial cottages that are all state heritage listed.
Unusually for single-fronted cottages, they are actually quite grand, they have side entrances
rather than front entrances so the hallways really only start from a third of the way down the house.
Meaning they have a grand reception room at the front and so the ability to bring some of that
grandness and detail that you might associate with a more substantial house was something
that was really interesting, a level of quality which is fairly unusual for a workers cottage.
And I guess more broadly with any heritage building, there's often
sort of an indefinable quality of detail and proportion which certainly is something that
we appreciate in terms of an existing context that we can then launch our new design from.
The house is about 220 square meters so it's not a huge house, unusually the brief wasn't
seeking to maximize functional space, in fact we've deleted a bedroom out of
what was originally a three-bedroom house, to go to a two-bedroom house.
Opening that opportunity to have separate living areas where you might have a more formal lounge
room at the front which overlooks the parklands and a separate more casual lounge room.
The emphasis was more on that experience of luxury.
I guess we in some way saw that as an opportunity to create different moods within the house,
the softer light in the front really lends itself to enjoyment at different times of day.
We've expanded a new opening from that sitting room into the entry hall when that
sort of invites some extra light into that space but still it's sort of a muted level
and then we've integrated skylights down the length of what is quite a long hallway,
that clearly demarks what is old and what is new.
And it was what we turned the never-ending lean-to, it's the existing footprint of a 1960s,
1970s lean-to and it just kept going down and down and down until it sort of terminated with a
big picture window facing north just to drag that light back into what is a long narrowing house.
An expanded volume really drenches that whole space in beautiful northern light.
Some of the impact of that narrower site meant cantilevering the kitchen out into
the garden with windows above and below the cooking surfaces.
The handmade doors, when they're folded back it's very much an extension of the inside space.
How a space interacts with outside is intrinsic to how it's going to
feel so thought was always given to the framework of that, the idea of really
inviting the garden in maximizes the relatively small footprint of garden.
Softens the house externally but also softens the feeling that you've got internally as well.
So when you're looking at an older house, or a heritage house especially,
a lot of the elements that make up that house have a handmade quality to them,
whether it's hand picking of stone or the actual moulding that is used.
So when you can bring in that element of handmade that just helps balance that idea
as well so the windows, beautifully made, but they also have an element of flaws
to them which come with something that is bashed together on an anvil
and that's a really nice balance to those more contemporary and clean surfaces then.
So the materials palette really was drawn from the idea of reduction and repetition,
where consistently using materials and then ensuring that we're sort
of layering those with texture and nuance.
Starts with the washed oak flooring which was slightly non-conscious
but a really beautiful connection to the existing sandstone front.
The oak then becomes a grounding element for many of the other components.
The joinery has been sort of toned to link in with that floor, there's use of the beautiful turco
argento limestone, which brings that detail to an otherwise pretty restrained palette.
All those are the kind of details that are very subtle but those kind
of things I think are one of the favourite parts of this house that I certainly like.
All these spaces are sort of founded on the same principles of simplicity and quality of detail.
A simplified reduced palette really allows for the more subtle features of a design
to come to life so the way that light moves across the space through the day and
appreciating the quality of that is enabled by a simplification of the framework that it's hitting.
You definitely get an overriding sense of calm.
Probably one of my favourite things about the house is it works really
hard from a planning and footprint point of view.
How you experience native flow through a house is really important.
That you don't overbuild something but you also don't underbuild it.
It started with a pretty simple objective of creating something that was equal to
the value of what already existed here within the heritage fabric,
a relatively small footprint but within that space, it really embodies what we believe
in as designers and hopefully holds the values of our clients within it.
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