My favourite part of this house is to spend time in the garden room with all
of the doors slid into the wall and the screens just filtering that afternoon
summer sun beautifully and you get a sense of the garden and the lovely high
ceilings and you just feel transported into your own secret garden sanctuary.
My name's Polly Harbison and I am the architect for this, the Linfield House project.
Lindfield is located on Sydney's North Shore where we are here it is an older
garden suburb but in more recent years there's been a push towards a bit of densification in
these suburbs that actually have great close proximity to the city so our clients Euan
and Margo fell in love with this site because it had both an incredible and unique garden.
As well as a beautiful old federation house.
The fundamental problem was that the house didn't have any connectivity to this garden and so really
the brief at its core was to resolve this and integrate the garden to the existing house.
Hi I'm Juliette and I'm Sarah-Jane and together we are Arent & Pyke and we're
the interior designers for Linfield House, when we met the clients they came armed with
a pile of World of Interiors magazines so we knew immediately that where their minds
were going was something that was quite nostalgic, quite romantic, quite magical.
Arriving at the house you're already in the most beautiful garden
but very quickly you move through to this new extension.
When you arrive at the kitchen your island is really front and centre.
And then on the right, there's a beautiful courtyard full of
the old bricks from the site that really kind of grounds the space.
You take a couple more steps down and then you're in the main garden room.
And from the large garden room off to the left is the master ensuite
And
master bedroom.
The planning of this house ignored the typical path of perhaps putting the bedrooms upstairs
because it was so important to really draw the greenery into the house at every opportunity,
the windows to the garden room are 3.3 meters tall so that you can see not just
the trunk of the tree but the beautiful extent of those enormous ironbarks.
The architectural materials are very simple and robust, we selected the recycled brick to
really tie the new contemporary form together with the existing federation house and then we
used off-form concrete to A. enable us to do the kind of structural gymnastics we wanted
to do to create these large 1.5-meter fat walls, but to this quite minimalist palette,
Arent & Pyke brought their skills with colour and texture and really brought the project to life.
In the new addition, we introduced these beautifully textured walls working with
Polly on how we would execute what we could see in the wall structure
and it was important that they didn't feel too new and too starkly finished,
so the beautiful render finish that we've used and the soft powdered rock colour actually really
bring that grounded earthiness to the space in this instance the client is the artist and
so we were always responding to the texture and the layering of her beautiful paintings.
A deep green for the joinery and a beautiful Calacatta Vagli for
the stone but then it's really this backdrop of the terrazzo checkerboard
floor which brings the romance and the nostalgia into the space.
Our design
philosophy really centres around transforming their homes with colour, spirit, character and
we believe that that's what really brings beauty and joy into the everyday experience of your home.
When Margo said she just had an outdoor shower, it was the most sublime experience because framed
in the big circle window was the full moon and I guess it's these moments about not just framing
the obvious but framing all parts of an experience available on a site it's just so important.