The feeling of this home for me is one of joy, you come to this home and
just to move through it is a pleasurable experience.
My name is Shaun Carter, Principal Architect of Carter Williamson Architects.
I'm the principal designer of this project, this project's name is Wurrungwuri.
We're on the Western flank of a place called Birchgrove, I'd like to acknowledge the Wan
and Gadi people of the Eora Nation and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging.
The brief from the clients for this project was really not, at the beginning,
unlike many other briefs, it's a heritage house, had this 1990s addition to the rear,
so the initial conversations were about how could we improve this house.
Taking on a project like this and how do you bring a new building to an old building is really a
great question that architects deal with a lot, and one we obviously dealt with here. It had the
accretion of this 1990s building that was sort of coalesced into the old form and we wanted to,
not only remove that because it didn't really respond well to the site nor to
the existing building, but to add to it in a way that allowed you to be referential to
look back and appreciate the old building but also how they respond to each of their
different contexts the old building to the street but the new building to the water.
My name is Ben Peake, Design Director at Carter Williamson and Project Architect for Wurrungwuri.
I'm Julie Niass, Senior Associate at Carter Williamson Architects and Interior Lead for our
Wurrungwuri project. For me and I probably speak for Shaun and Ben also, this project was really
the epitome of that perfect triad in collaboration between the client, architect and the builder,
and that's one of the great things about having you know architect and interior designers,
essentially working around the same table in the office,
is that we can come to site together and really design those interior spaces together.
So when you're walk in through the front door it's got that wonderful gesture of front door
to the street, so you open that front door and you walk into the old building of Wurrungwuri
that's a beautiful building with sort of, living spaces to one side and bedrooms to the other side,
There's a space in between that threshold when you walk into the new and the bedroom's beyond
which is this wonderful gallery space, this double-height void where you can stand around
and you can look down to the dining room below, and that becomes a really significant part of
the building, then going down the house so you wind down through these stairs off to
the left hand side we've got these darker spaces that sit under the original house,
then you cascade down I guess into the main engine room of the house where we have that
really significant dining space that's where the table sits and it's held by the void above and
that lovely big Tom Dixon light and just beyond that we have the kitchen which is the real engine
room of the house. Going down to the lower level so back up to the stairs and winding all the way
down you have this room that we call the Cabana, which is really the great lounge room of the house
and then off to the other side we have the TV room which is a long, elongated space and again
both of those spaces open onto these terraces as the plan keeps on sliding down and out of the way,
and then outside, particularly off the Cabana area we've got the pool
Once we get past the cleave we have these cascading stairs and
they go all the way down with this beautiful old sandstone sea wall.
Going up the stairs that one final time you come out on this beautiful generous roof terrace,
it's about 60 square meters, that sits within a garden amplified by having the harbour beyond.
When you're designing a house on the harbour in Sydney it comes with a big overhang of
story and emotion, sometimes the response has been just to throw just glass at it,
where here it was slightly different response, we're very conscious of harnessing that view but
equally where the view outside was enough we allowed those windows to be solid,
sometimes there's a wall here and there deliberately holding and blocking a view
so we could take you either side so we can control that view and what you see.
Natural lighting is such an important part of every home and here at Wurrungwuri we've used
it in a number of different ways, so primarily through the courtyards and the glazing but also
through a number of well-placed voids that connect the different levels to
each other. We use many voids in Carter Williamson's language of architecture,
for us it's about generosity, the void gives you so much more than the space it takes away
so here we've used three different types of voids, we've got the void over the dining room,
we have that lovely teardrop void which is not quite as big that's about a visual connection
and a social connection to the Cabana from the kitchen area and then we have that lovely sort of
interstitial void at the cleave to emphasize the depth of that cleave but also to bring light down.
The new addition to the original sandstone cottage was always going to be a critical
aspect of the design, we understood that bringing the new building to the old was
going to be really important in the understanding not only of the old building but of the new,
and we had a sense that that needed to be sympathetic in many ways.
So externally we're referencing the materiality of the original sandstone cottage and using a
really beautiful blonde brick, the main structure of the home is concrete and
then obviously given the views and the aspect there's a lot of glass that's being used as
well so they become I guess the foundation materials and composition of the exterior,
so then when we come into the insides we're responding then to how they've been used outside.
and then with that we added layers of texture and tactility to bring the
monumentality of the architecture to a domestic scale for living.
Another part of the client's brief was, they wanted a sense of wow and
discovery throughout the home. An example of that is in the kitchen where we've been
able to use really rich materials using two stones, custom stained joinery and
introduce really expressive elements like the pendant light you can see behind me.
So for the flooring we chose timber as a nice warmth contrast to the expressed
concrete ceilings. What you can't see under the timber is the hydronic underfloor heat,
it works much the same way as the Opera House system does where we're exchanging
hot and cold with the harbour through these wonderful sophisticated heat pump systems
in a plant room that possibly is the most beautiful plant room, that's running all
the hot and cold water for the house it's also doing all the heating and cooling of the house.
The home has really been designed around family life but when you go down to the basement level
it's an opportunity for us to treat it a little bit more like an art gallery.
We have the exposed sandstone wall with that really bold Dion Horstman artwork and the stair
at Wurrungwuri is a real beautiful example of the collaboration between the client's ambition, the
architect's design and the builders craftsmanship in bringing all those things together.
The favorite part of this home for me is standing on
the grass and looking back at the house and seeing its resolution,
that expressive nature but truly capturing not only the the client but also the site.