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We like to name homes, we don't just want to say it's "Annandale House 3" because we
think that's impersonal. This house was clearly very personal so the name comes from
three things; the brick was blonde, the floors were concrete,
my favourite bands in the 80's when I was a young man was Concrete Blonde.
So the client of this house, the clients Peter and Irene, came to us with a dream of
renovating a house that was not just a normal renovation or not a renovation in the term
of, you know, real estate, but they really just wanted to make a home.
With Concrete Blonde there was this other conversation that we had
particularly with Irene which circulated around a desire for having this lovely green gardens
all around the building but not only around the building but can they creep into the building and
start to inform the conversation of what those internal spaces would be. Having our service
walls anchor the building with this lovely soft green and then that flowing through the
the whole house as this emotional memory became a really powerful part of the design dialogue.
Incorporating the heritage facade into design is really a given with projects
like this so Carter Williamson has a long history of working
in council areas that have this heritage overlay or working with heritage items,
so we always come to these projects with a great deal of respect for the existing dwelling.
Also understanding that being a terrace house; what you see from the front is one
part of the story, what you see from the back is an entirely different part of the story.
What we try and do is respect the heritage buildings for what they are,
we let them tell their story and we get to a certain moment within the building where there's
a clear incision where we cut the building and we say to; the left of that is the old building and
we keep that and restore it, and to the right of that is where we tell the new story of this home.
Concrete Blonde is really challenged for light given that the tall part of the building
faces the street so what we did is I guess a classical architectural device
is at that junction where we separate old and new we introduced a light well
so that light well becomes the light lungs of the home. But that wasn't enough we didn't feel for
Concrete Blonde, we felt that we needed to do something more so we introduced a little light
scoop that sat right up on the top of the roof right near the tallest part of the roof and that's
reaching out and grabbing that northern light and pushing it right down through the middle.
When we started this process with Peter and Irene there was a conversation right from the
get-go about longevity. Here's a building that'd already been with us for more than 120 years
and Irene and Peter were very conscious that anything we did we didn't
wasn't going to be wasteful and if we're going to make significant intervention into the house that
had to be meaningful. And if we did that right then we were setting this building up to live
for another 120 years. We're really designing a jewellery box getting all those little
details working well so the house feels like it works easily even though it's tight for space.
Again a lot of the conversations about Concrete Blonde with Irene were about those personal
connections she had not only with the old building that she found but the new building
what it was to mean to her and Petera as this home intrinsically became hers.
For Carter Williamson, Concrete Blonde is a deeply personal special project.
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