The project's located in Fairfield in a Northern suburb of Melbourne.
The site's about 500 meters from the Yarra River and it's on the land of the Wurundjeri people.
It's certainly different designing for yourself, at times you're the architect,
at times you're the client, at times you're the owner and I think the challenge with that
is thinking across all those different roles at once, but became a kind of dance between making
the decision as an owner, when you're making the decision as an architect, having to compromise
with yourself on a project to try and come up with the best outcome for everyone involved.
The initial design ideas for the home was to create an easy,
family home to live in for myself, my partner and our two boys.
We wanted a house that would open up to the outside and encourage use around the
site throughout the garden and also to create a single communal space for
living out the back that would allow us space to come together as a family
but also quieter spaces to go off individually and have time apart.
The garden's a really critical element of this project.
The concrete seats that you can sit on the edge of the deck, that you can lean over,
the parts where the garden begin are really some of the richest moments of the project.
I think that's only going to increase in time when
the vines continue to grow and everything builds up around us.
At the front of the site is the original double brick house, we've maintained three
of the rooms as bedrooms, two face the street, the third one opens up onto the central deck.
The kitchen space was designed to be the central part of the house,
we spend a lot of time in the kitchen and when thinking about it's layout and its function,
the idea of the island bench meant that the focus remained inward.
In our practice we always look at opportunities for spaces to be not only functional,
but to provide spaces for people to live in and the kitchen's a classic example in this project.
The sink, the stove top, it serves its functional purpose but then the long
timber bench functions certainly as a kitchen bench but it's also a place to sit, to work,
to read at and to have conversations. The space is used to live in as well as to function.
Some of the issues or challenges when designing with heritage homes are often about light but the
house is designed with passive orientation. It has excellent access to Northern light
as well as East and Western Sun right from the first light of the morning,
throughout the day and in the evening, you get light penetrating into the plan and it
creates at times, a real softness and at times a much darker sunlight that comes into the plan,
and the ability to moderate that light manually really adds to that element as well.
We've really focused the materiality on timber,
timber framing, timber rafters, timber pergola is used throughout the project for consistency,
and what it creates is a kind of structural frame that's then infilled by these other
timber elements. The timber material was chosen in part for its warmth,
but also for its robustness and its user friendliness. Two kids running around and
an active family life, it's something that they can use, it's not particularly precious,
that vibe really was a bit of a driver through the project to have a house that
had great moments of beauty but also could allow family life to function in a really easy way.
Probably my favourite part of the project is the sense of ease that this house has
and the ability to live a really relaxed family life. Everyone needs a home that's
both containing but also expansive, you want a place that can protect you,
can cocoon you and can allow you to live the life that you want to live.