Paddington's an inner city suburb of Brisbane that's quite hilly. This site sits in one
of the rolling valleys and that was one of the things that really set up this project.
Boone and Sarah came to me with two main things in their brief. The first was a house that they could
retreat to, to escape busy work lives. Both of their parents come and visit for a couple
of months at a time, so the other part of their brief was about creating spaces that they could
be here with them but still separate enough that they didn't feel like they were living on top of
each other. So that's one of the reasons why the plan of the house is elongated down the site and
pulled apart into three square modules, which is kind of where the name Three House comes from.
One of the things about doing a project in Paddington is local council has a really
strict character overlay and that's why this project ends up with these kind of
pyramid-shaped roofs that are very similar to the other cottages in the neighbourhood.
One of the things that we had to overcome was how to deal with this flood water through
the middle of the block and that's where the plan of the building starts to straddle that
overland flow area and so you'll notice that the house is kind of elevated off the ground, but
done as a series of platforms. The area closest to the ground is the most public,
so we step up from the backyard to an entry patio and then from there up again into a living area
and then slowly you step up to the bedrooms and so every time we change levels,
you're getting a little bit further into the more private parts of the house.
Stretching the plan and creating these series of modules that sit down the site brought
the opportunity to have the spaces in between capture light and draw it deep into the plan.
Each little space creates its own courtyard or tree space. I think the landscape's been key with
this project, in terms of the clients brief of trying to make a tranquil place for them away from
their work lives, but also it's one of the methods that we're using here to make a smaller plan
feel a lot larger. The living space that we're in, all the doors and windows slide away so that
it feels almost like a veranda that's sitting in between the two sleeping spaces at each end.
The finishes are a bit darker and all the door and window joinery is painted black
and that's to let your eye draw out into the landscape and make the room feel bigger.
Boone and Sarah grew up in Penang, this hub of Malaysia
with amazing foods from lots of different places and so it became apparent that eating
and cooking was quite important to them and became the real focus in this living space.
One of the things we've done in the bedroom is kind of flipped
the general idea of having a window up high and solid below.
In this case, we've got a shutter that's solid up above that can slide down.
When it's shut, you still have the lovely view through textured glass and see the
landscape below. So you can actually crack them down a little bit and see out but
be walking around kind of just straight out of the shower. Each of the square bedroom spaces
of the house have a raked ceiling and at the top there's a skylight. It's there for ventilation,
but the other thing it does is lets in lovely diffuse light throughout the day.
Constraints are really great in a project. In this one, we were really trying to target a budget and
so the bedroom spaces that you spend the least amount of time in are detailed really simply, just
plasterboard walls, timber floor, but the more public spaces that you might enjoy with friends,
that's where we kind of use slightly richer materials, so in this living space
there's timber cladding on the walls, much larger detailed sliding doors and openings.
I guess one of the pragmatic parts of this project was not to make it too complicated
by having only two or three different types of windows, so I only have to draw them once or
twice and the builder then can work out how to do them and then we repeat that. So there's the
window shutters that you see in each bedroom, there's the louver windows in other places like
the bathrooms and then large timber frame doors in this space. One of the outcomes of having to
lift the house up off the ground was it created a series of useful and adaptable undercroft spaces.
The chimney is really interesting as well, it's actually holding the house up,
it's like the big piece of structure in the centre that everything's braced off. I think that's one
of the things that I do in a lot of my projects is trying to make everything have more than one use.
I think the nice thing about this house is over time it can be used in different ways,
by different people, as owners change. So at the moment it's two houses; there's the main house in
the granny flat. It could be one big house; we can actually link the two with a bridge. Or the third
way, it can be split into three, with each little area addressing the street with its own entrance.