There's a peaceful quality to the home it has this kind of
soft almost immersive feeling as if you're sitting in the garden.
My name's Andrew Ben and I'm the founding director of Ben + Penna
Architecture and I've been the architect for this project in Turramurra, Sydney.
So Turramurra in the outer northern suburbs of Sydney, it's a particular
sort of garden-focused neighbourhood with some very charming heritage-listed houses.
So the clients for this project were Sue and Andrew a really wonderful couple that we got
along tremendously well with, Sue particularly was very involved in the project and I'd say
she's an unusually creative person so she really was fundamentally involved
in every aspect of what we did and together we achieved an incredible outcome because of it.
My name's Sue and I am the client for this project, Turramurra House.
So I saw a beautiful set of townhouses that Andrew had designed in Balmain
and I decided to reach out to him and the process began from there.
In terms of the original home we wanted to retain as much of it as we could and we wanted
to highlight all the beautiful original features and lead like windows and the gorgeous ceilings
and we wanted to give her a new lease of life without losing any of the beautiful character.
So the brief Sue and Andrew had was really two-fold on the one hand it was how to bring back
the charm of the original old building but on the other hand how to adopt it to their modern family.
So one particularly important aspect was how to connect the house to the garden I
mean the garden had an incredible potential that wasn't utilised when I first saw it,
it's a key drive around the whole development was that fusion of the garden.
So in the design I wanted a really neutral palette,
lots of natural finishes but with some drama as well and then other material choices then
fell in behind that idea and they had very soft tones with low saturations.
There have been so many benefits to adding the extension onto the back but one of the
unexpected things is the beautiful light and how it changes during the day whether
it's in the morning and the light is coming in predominantly through the large skylight
and from the east or even late in the afternoon when we get the western sun.
So light's a particularly important aspect of this project,
it's predominantly coming from three different sources first of them being a
small little pocket garden that separates the new additions from the original home
and then as the sun tracks across the sky it comes in from the back rear facade that faces west,
and then the third source of light's coming from this
particularly large skylight that sits on the southern slope of the roof so it's one that's
sort of constantly dropping a very even source of light across the space throughout the day.
My favourite detail in the project is this soaring arch it's a direct reflection of
the traditional victorian arch that frames the front entry of the house.
My favourite part is the new extension to the house, I love being in this space,
I love walking down the stairs, I feel instantly calm, I feel so happy with my family are all in
here eating and cooking and spilling out onto the terrace and down to the pool.