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The feeling of the home is like a cocoon the angles and the curves really wrap
around you and despite the hard surfaces it has a surprisingly calming and comforting feel to it.
Hi I'm Michelle Orszaczky and this is Rebecca Clayton and we're the directors
of Clayton Orszaczky and this is our Grove House project for which I was the project architect.
This project is in Woollahra in Sydney's East, the whole suburb is almost a heritage conservation
area full of Victorian housing and terrace housing types, this house was a heritage item we really
wanted to preserve the original fabric of the dwelling and connect our addition sensitively.
So as you enter the front part of the house which is the original Heritage dwelling you
have the more formal rooms to the left and the right [Music] which connects to the dining space
So directly in front of the front entry in the void space is the
original timber staircase of the house which takes you up to the bedroom spaces.
[Music]
Past the timber staircase are the new additions to the home that we
designed being the family space and the kitchen and service areas of the house.
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The clients for this house were fantastic we actually strangely worked with them at
our previous firm Alex Popov where Michelle and I also met and they were I guess very adept in the
process of designing a home and were on board with the ideas that we had from the beginning.
[Music]
The original house was really disconnected from the garden so that was a core driver
for the design of this new dwelling was that it would connect with the Grove.
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In fact, it was one of the main aspects of the brief that the client brought
to us that it must connect to the grove and to the garden.
Yes so there is a shared private garden between about five or six of the terrace
houses in the immediate vicinity it's called The Grove and it's quite like
the English muse or the model of the English muse that you see in the UK and the five or
six houses that surrounded all tend to it and use it, it also creates a real sense
of community and is often the scene for a kids party or a casual conversation.
[Music]
In terms of the landscape we collaborated with Tanya Wood Landscape Architect and
she designed both the garden at ground level and the roof garden.
So with any addition to a heritage item there's always a dialogue between new and old that you
must address and we did specifically choose to contrast to the existing form with a new addition
and to further emphasize that contrast we used or form concrete steel Windows
Timber veneer and black porcelain in the kitchen.
The use of concrete provided mass in a similar way as the original use of masonry so there's
a natural dialogue between mass and aperture in the building and certainly as we transition
between the existing house and the new house we pick up the proportional ratios of the terrace
house form and repeat them as we transition to the more dynamic forms of the new edition.
Form and lighting in this project is key so drawing North and Eastern light into the
back part of the family room and kitchen spaces informed the entire shape of the
dwelling and the large expanse of glass to the Western elevation was also really key to that
idea of connecting to the grove and drawing light into the rear spaces of the dwelling.
Now sitting here and I think about the project my favourite part is the soft form of the exterior
and looking at it from the grove and thinking about the contribution that the form of this
building has made to the grove and the shared community space for me I'm most proud of how
happy our clients are and how the project really reflects their brief and how this shapes and forms
really surprise them and challenged what they were expecting to see at the end of the process.
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