hi I'm Jane Graham from Winter Architecture and this is my client Nick
Russell
this apartment is located above a shop right in the heart of Torquay it's a
sort of a cream brick 1960 era block with the shops underneath and two holiday
apartments on top
we lived in this apartment as a family myself my wife Michelle and our two kids
six-year-old Lucy and four-year-old Edward when we first approached the
space we looked at how we can get it to work better and one of the ways of doing
that was just changing some of the doorway entrances it was more of an
evolution process where we were all engaged with the design to get it to a
certain level and Kevin a carpenter then applied another layer of detail to
those and obviously the tight budget meant we were looking at things like IKEA
and then substituting them with more local materials just trying to have
that tweak that fine balance the idea of the entrance is it's quiet it's cool
it's just a large opening space and celebrate the existing entrance door
with the readed glass and keep that light that's in that area coming through
to the space so there's a sense of beyond
I quite like those low-level Scandinavian style unit with IKEA
carcasses and cupboards but wrapped in this really good quality birch ply a
fairly low budget and also custom-built five minutes long I was most impressed
by the design changes in the kids room Nick and Michelle would like to live
here for a little bit of time so I was thinking about how each child could have
their own space by creating separate levels to play with hierarchy within the
room so that they could both see out the window to the water there's small
curtains around each bed to create privacy and they can choose to open and
close with their own little bed lights so underneath adds fed which is lower
and can house longer-term storage and then below in the taller bunk that is a
hanging rail with for clothing and wrapping the walls is a felt pin board
that kids can pin their own art and create their own individuality within
the space and also the pin one is a little bit acoustic so that they can
scream a little bit and it sort of gets absorbed and it's it feels nice it's
cozier for them they really love it Master bed was already in the living
space as kids were in the smaller room before we just had a normal bed frame
sitting on the floor with things pushed underneath and now we've got kind of
like a platform or kind of bedroom so it can transform from the bedroom to a
daybed so we raised the platform have storage underneath for things like your
Mason guitar and then created a bed head around the kitchen which means you can
tuck the bedroom pillows away behind the bed head in the day and then set it up
as a daybed so so far the platform also creates a beautiful line between what is
public and what is private we're going for a sort of off-white tone fabric
allows light to transmit through the space so even though the curtain might
be shut people in the dining area still have secondary light coming through we
put the main storage in between the living zone and the children face and
that creates a threshold between the two the wardrobes are right here except we
also have an additional little joinery item a carpenter cave built kind of
attachments to it and which kind of make it all tie together most of the original
features are maintained same thing with the old kitchen it's a 2
by 4 kitchen we've lovingly restored it so that it's maintained part of that
coastal holiday retreat
we're the original door to the bathroom was we actually created a really large
pantry for the kitchen between the kitchen and the master bedroom space
there's a falldown table that comes from a central pillar we've got that the
yachting toggles and the piano hinges and we use it all the time also
the kids use it for crafts and play and get involved in food prep the bathroom
is the original bathroom but we've retiled it and kept the original bath in
the same location and we just put a new vanity cabinet in and some kept it
really simple the overall project value was eighteen thousand dollars six
thousand of that was materials as a team I think we've done really well with a
small budget in a short amount of time whilst you're all still living here
right while we're still living