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This house, it looks at the past with rose tinted glasses. It is an ode to romanticism.
My name is Luigi Rosselli Architect and we will present you here La Casa Rosa.
La Casa Rosa is located in Bronte, over an escarpment, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, which
was colonised in the late 19th century and has a lot of original houses left on this escarpment.
When one enters through the front of the house, you find the original rooms and the original rooms
were not very large, they were quite compact and they were ideal to place the kids bedrooms and
then you walk through the house and you arrive to the new addition at the back, which is a very
informal, open living space with a kitchen, dining and a sitting area. Dominated by
a stair which links to the first floor editions which are completely new.
The existing house was a Victorian house of style which we call neo-gothic, with steep roof
and in that period there was a lot of attention into the detailing, where
builders were more important than architects.
So the aims of this project was to maintain as much as possible of an existing home, which
is always a battle because they have their own defects and I think the attitude should be to find
the best of the old and make it last longer. So, we reuse bricks, we reuse timber for the formwork,
we reuse some of the sandstone and there was some roof tiles which were left from the demolitions
that were carefully stacked and reused as a tile screen which is a kind of a breeze soleil - it
means in French, "break the sun" - and it breaks the sun on the western side and also when we raise
the roof, we put the same screen all around the connection between the new roof and existing roof.
The characteristic of a lot of our work is to work with fluid lines. For example, you know the stair
is not an angular stare, it is a stair which meanders up and makes the ascension
much easier. The same for the fireplace; the fireplace has got a soft curve towards the west
and it provides a very gradated light over the walls.
One of the elements that we retain is also the pool. Most of the people tend to say, rebuild
me a pool, particularly was a funny peanut shape and it's not a very popular shape these days. We
say no, we thought that the peanut shape would be quite suitable for the landscaping concept.
The house is a house which you can feel the passing of a day. In the centre of the house,
there's a light well next to the stairwell and that allows the middle of the day lights
to come through and then towards the western side, the back of a house,
you have large windows opening to the garden, which filters the hot western sun.
My family had a country house which was built in the same period than this house
and they had the same Victorian features but the main feature was that the house was
pink and a washed kind of pink, a beautiful wash pink, not a flat pink. Therefore
when the client asks me what colour should we paint it, I say well, obviously it should be pink.
There was some silence from the client and consideration and then they say, okay.
I'm really proud of how well the house suits our clients.
They seem to be very happy within their house and their space. I feel that was an achievement
because architects very often impose on the client something that they reluctantly
embrace and I thought that they did embrace completely this project.
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