I think when you enter this home you get a sense of the unexpected because it's really
clear where the site is but this home doesn't necessarily reveal all those
layers and views in one go so it's a really lovely journey and a beautiful surprise.
I'm Eva-Marie Prineas principal of Studio Prineas, The Architects for Fisherman's House.
Fisherman's House is located on the land of the Birrabirragal and Wangal
people of the Eora Nation. Birchgrove is a little suburb on the Parramatta
River just three kilometres away and around the corner from Sydney Harbor.
The site's quite an unusual one because the cottage sits quite close to the river
and then the road is nine meters above so there's a large drop across the sandstone
cliff and as far as we can see this is one of the last remaining timber cottages in the area.
When you arrive at Fisherman's House all you can really see
is a hard stand for a car and a little pop-up for the lift.
Entering through the main cottage the original rooms of the cottage can be read through the
kitchen, living, and dining areas, the main communal spaces to the cottage.
There's a glazed link with two courtyards on either side and
then we designed a vertical wing at the rear which houses all the private spaces.
I've known our client Dean since he was born we were family friends growing up
and our families are very close so this one was a really special
one and we worked together with Dean and Raquel in a really lovely trusting way.
Dean has a background in engineering and he was just a fantastic client who ended up becoming a
bit of a project manager and it was just lovely to see the reverence he had for our design.
Our clients were quite open with the design brief so we
were able to explore the design process in a very organic way.
The main thing they wanted was to live on the riverside that's where they wanted their
living areas they weren't specific necessarily about keeping the cottage or demolishing it
and building a new home, certainly keeping it was one of the things that we really pushed hard for.
When our clients purchased the property the cottage had been clad in corrugated steel,
the veranda to the riverside had been enclosed and inside there had been significant alteration
so we started the whole process by restoring the cottage and removing all the corrugated cladding,
once we did that we found all the original weatherboards and so we
were able to restore those and then patch where we needed to.
Similarly on the inside of the cottage we were able to reuse the old lining boards
once we removed all the plasterboard that had been added over time the original floorboards
were also something that we really wanted to keep during excavation of the swimming pool
we found sandstone blocks which could have been old sea walls or old foundations and
all of that stone was kept on site and then reused to form part of the pool enclosure.
With the new wing we really wanted to have quite a contrast to the lightness of the timber cottage
and create something that was really grounded and spoke more with the rock face behind.
In terms of materials of the new wing the ceilings are made of concrete with rough sawn
oregon form work, so you get this lovely timber look and imprint on the concrete.
There's also a lot of timber in the project we've used the Japanese method for
blackened timber on the floors and also on the stair which is lined in walnut veneer.
I think what I'm most proud of in this project
is that we were able to conserve the cottage
and create a beautiful contemporary home for our clients.
This project holds so many ideas about design that we have been working on as a practice
over many many years and when I look back I can see that the project embodies so many of those.
Probably my favourite part of the house is the swimming pool because it's the
last bit that you see as you move through the house and it's quite unexpected, it holds so
much history in the sandstone and it's just a delightful place to sit and watch the sunset.