We wanted to create a home that had a sense of understated elegance, one that flowed beautifully
and had a sort of serenity to it that was hard to describe but incredibly alluring.
I'm Bianca Pohio from Pohio Adams Architects and I was the lead architect on this project.
The house is located at the top of the hill in Bellevue Hill
which is about five minutes from Sydney CBD and it's oriented westward. Bellevue Hill
is quite a leafy, established older area so you do have quite lovely mature trees along the streets
and does give it that sort of established feel that people tend to like about Bellevue Hill.
So the clients came to me wanting to do a hard landscaping project and some minor renovations
at the back of the property, however as we worked together it became apparent that their
requirements were more than that and the brief grew organically and turned into quite substantial
renovation as you can see. The original home was a 1940s bungalow that unfortunately had been victim
to lots of renovations over the years, so our challenge was to reinvigorate all of that detail.
So we kept a number of the original features that included the front facade and keeping the front
three rooms which were formal spaces. Apart from that, we actually reintroduced new re-proportioned
openings into a number of the rooms in the house. We made a lot of the doorways taller
and added in new skirtings and architraves that were all a much more grand proportion.
The heritage aspect to the home presented considerable structural challenge; we needed to
hold the front part of the house up so that we could excavate substantially under
the front left-hand corner, to accommodate the enlarged garage and passageway up into the home.
We chose to explore the outside-inside planning approach not necessarily consciously
but think as apparent in many old homes, the front part of the house is often quite
internal and you know, has more of an interior kind of focus
and you're sort of in a room and then looking out through certain apertures, whereas
we created a dichotomous relationship between the back and the front so when you're in this
pavilion, you feel more like you're in a garden as opposed to being in a room.
The specific features that encapsulate the inside-outside relationship are this large
steel and glass pavilion, also looking up through the oculi in the living room,
you can get a beautiful view of the eucalypt above the house.
Another example of the inside-outside significance I guess is the master bedroom;
it has a lovely balcony that's oriented west and has a lovely view towards the CBD.
The stealing glass pavilion was an addition that was kind of almost the opposite to what was
previously here prior to the project. There was a lean-to which was very dark and unfriendly and
quite, sort of internally focused and we wanted to kind of flip that and open the space right out to
the garden and actually maximize the connectivity to the surrounds and to the landscaping.
Well the landscaping was done by Dangar Barin Smith and we collaborated with them. It's integral
really to the design of the house. The terrace at the front of the house isn't something that
we would typically do but there was already an existing seating area out there, we just tried
to make it feel much more private and enclosed. It's actually the perfect sort of winter garden,
so when it's cooler you still get beautiful warm sun in the evenings and afternoons.
The kitchen is certainly the heart of the home it's a hero piece in the design
and it's well suited to the clients who are avid entertainers. The scale of the kitchen
accommodates large groups; it's about 4.2 metres long
and there's seating available for about six people and also it's very open,
so you can circulate around it easily and it's also centrally located in the rear pavilion.
The main materials used in the house are natural oak, dark stained oak, aged brass,
venetian plaster and some sort of bronze elements and steel that referenced the 1940s
but actually were more grand in scale than they probably would have been previously
and the re-proportioning of those details
helped connect them to the more modern flavour at the back of the house.
I'm most proud of how unified this project is, from the finest detail right through to
the planning and the sort of greater architectural gestures.
I feel that the house is resolved on all sorts of levels.