An ambitious brief combined with a constrained budget required the design of this house to be crafted in a way that facilitated a staged construction process from the conception of the project.
In the 1980s, the single storey fibro shack on this site was raised onto steel posts and wrapped in a new layer of brick to create a double storey brick box, rather unsympathetic to its surroundings. Tanna Green Architect’s concept was to retain the majority of the existing building to save resources and cost, and to “wrap” it again with a new layer of steel framed recycled hardwood timber screens to continue the building’s rich temporal evolution.
The detailing and articulation of these screens create outdoor spaces private from neighbouring buildings, frame vistas out to district views, shade the building from the rising/setting sun, create a new dramatic entry and create striking sculptural forms that add depth to the flat existing walls.
A new timber framed roof was crafted to project out beyond the external walls of the building creating shelter to the entry and controlled shading to north facing high level windows. These operable windows allow natural sunlight to filter into the entire upper story and ground floor living room and also create a pressure variation that ventilates the entire house.
The internal transformation involved rearranging non load-bearing walls to the ground floor to accommodate two new intersecting open plan living spaces and a home office around a central kitchen. A rear extension connects to a large outdoor deck through oversized sliding doors creating a seamless connection between the inside and outside along the entire width of the building.
The young homely family with a passion for the outdoors required a visual connection between the new detached garage and workshop and the living spaces of the house to keep an eye on the children, creating a dialogue between the two buildings and treating the typical Aussie backyard as an outdoor room extension to the house.
