The house is located in the inner-north suburb of Brunswick. Brunswick is one
of the oldest suburbs in Melbourne, known for its bluestone and brick quarries which
have now been filled up to form a lot of the parks that you see here today.
My name is Stephanie Kitingan, co-director of Placement Studio and I was the architect
working on Brunswick House located on the lands of the Wurundjeri Peoples of the Kulin Nation.
The client had lived in the house for almost a decade and was quite settled
into the warmth and the feel of the house he wasn't looking for anything too pretentious
so the brief was to create a design that was quietly clever and robust,
it's quite a narrow block only about five meters wide and the tactic that was used
to tackle the plan was really to rectify a defunct terrace typology common to the area.
So the bricks are laid in a stack bond and this accentuates the verticality in
the space due to the verticality of the pattern.
Nubrik Artisan was the brick material used to pay homage to Brunswick's quarries
choosing the Nubrik was a really great experience Brickworks are quite
collaborative in the way they work through specifications even when we
were on site and working through how to apply the brick to the floor as well as the wall.
Brickworks were quite involved in getting that format to work for us.
The Nubrik Artisan has a lovely tactility to them and when seen on mass creates a really
nice textural quality and it pairs subtly with the terracotta tiles that we use in the kitchen
and it was actually a really nice contrast to the blue tiles that we use in the bathroom.
The front bedroom was maintained as the main bedroom, the fireplace was left unfinished just
to retain that story of the space moving through to the centre of the house there is a release
and a decompression through a double height ceiling and this makes way to the dining area.
The dining area then leads down through two hallways one to access the bathroom.
The other hallway is a galley kitchen and both these hallways lead down to the living room.
The mezzanine is a multi-purpose space it could function as a rumpus, a second bedroom and an
office space, but ultimately works really hard in helping to zone the separate dining and living.
The living room then opens up to the backyard which is essentially a courtyard sandwich
between a rear pavilion and the living room facade, a semi-underground water tank due to
the low levels of the site was cleverly hidden by dense planting, over time the greenery will
sort of just take over the fences and become this tiny little nook of green for the client.
A crucial design element in responding to the narrow nature of the site was to allow light
to penetrate into the centre of the building, now that was done via the use of the central
courtyard which allows that north light to sort of get right into the dining area because we were
working within such a small space, we needed the joinery to do a lot of heavy lifting to make this
space work well, so the joinery creates seamless transitions between the living, the dining,
the mezzanine by creating these overlapping lines we try to steer away from artificial finishes
and select materials that were more natural in turn that would stand the test of time.
When I look around, I am most proud of how we've managed to fit so much into such a small space
but everything done quite gracefully and with refined sense of detail
it's hard to pick a favourite spot because the spot is sort of one space but I would
say it's a tie between the back living room Banquette and sitting in the dining room
looking out to the back garden it's quite pleasing and quite timeless.