The scale of the house is really really small but every single space from the
hallway to the lounge to the kitchen to wherever you are in the house,
you gain the benefit of this courtyard room into every other space.
I'm Kim Bridgland from Edition Office Architects and I'm Aaron Roberts and
we're at the Naples Street House.
The Naples Street House is located on the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne here in Wurundjeri country.
The brief for this home began from the premise of a multigenerational house.
Another key requirement was that the home needed to have a presence to the
street and that really drove the need for a facade, I guess a formalism or strength of
having this brick facade wrap up the front wall and over to the roof of the house.
When there's this sense of a multigenerational home it's also important to have these, I guess,
interstitial spaces and discreet spaces that circle around that home and allow that sense of
being able to kind of recluse and draw together is really important in this kind of home.
The house has has a slight falling grade from
the rear of the site falling gently down to the street.
With the gravel driveway rising up with a small little gravel mound, from that galvanised steel
entry alcove we walk into a long corridor, that axial hallway runs adjacent to that
central courtyard and gives you a glimpse to that heart of the home when you enter the front door.
Running parallel to that entrance hallway we have the two children's bedrooms, the bathroom
and our client's bedroom suite with one more generous open space with a robe,
a bedroom and their own private ensuite.
At the end of that long corridor you enter into one shared social space of the house at
the Northern end of the property, taking in the dining room, the kitchen and the lounge room,
and on the Western Wing we have our laundry, the elder parents room and
then continuing that idea of having axial sight lines from the kitchen through the dining space
so we look through that minor hallway through an open study space which opens to the street.
Working within dense urban or suburban environments we're always
looking for opportunities for real sanctuary.
For this project it's very much an inward looking house,
the bedrooms create almost a defensive shield, they hold the outer perimeter
of the house allowing all of the social, the shared spaces of the home to all focus
around the central courtyard and soak in that sunlight and soaking that sense of silence.
In some ways there's this sense of like a denial of context in a way but often in these kinds of
conditions we do look for those assets that are kind of broader from the site,
we harvest the sky and we borrow from this
enormous and extraordinary gum tree and we create a site onto itself.
I think it's really interesting how we kind of conceptualise homes, typically you'll draw
diagrams to allow for particular kind of relationships to place or to frame certain
views or to bring light in in certain ways and in this instance we obviously did that but we also
were diagramming the way that people would live together and how they could share space together.
So for the compact nature of this home, the kitchen axis is fulcrum point within
the social heart of the home, it's part of the dining space and it's part of the living space
really opens onto every aspect of this home through that central courtyard and so it was
really important to have appliances that gave us that sense of design freedom so that the
qualities, the atmosphere of the home could be the thing that we celebrate, and supporting a large
multigenerational family within a small footprint home we needed really practical, pragmatic aspects
like a large freezer, a large fridge, discreetly concealed within this fairly small footprint
kitchen and then having that really accessible hardworking, utilitarian laundry space
and having highly energy efficient appliances that give you the full range of fabric care.
So the Fisher & Paykel appliances in the home really allowed us to plan a more flexible space
and allow for a kitchen which can be used by a multitude of the family all at once.
The material palette of the house is consciously robust and consciously simple, we have a
burnished concrete floor, we have spotted gum plywood walls, we have this immersive wrapping of
brickwork over the outer facade up over the roofs and down to this outdoor room of the courtyard.
Clarifying all of the key spaces of the house
so we have a painted ceiling that lifts dramatically and also the walls bring
this warmth to what could be conceived as a very hard outer shell a very hard building.
Looking back on the project and visiting today, the cinematic quality of moving
around the home is really what excites me most about the project.
There is always such a great sense of delight coming into the house,
circling around this outdoor room and feeling that sense of theatricality it's
the formal nature of the home and the roof forms lift up and down and ebb and flow.