Innehållsförteckning för Issue 154 October 2023 från Houses

The idea of living in a Georgian terrace house can be romantically intoxicating. It’s easy to conjure up a vision of beautifully proportioned spaces featuring high ceilings lit by dappled sunlight streaming through wonderfully crafted paned-glass windows. But achieving something spacious and beautiful in homes of this era is not as easy as it might seem. In Australia, this fantasy is generally tempered by the fact that Georgian-era terrace houses were most often built speculatively, and were both modest in size and frugal in detail. Cole’s Buildings, a set of colonial Georgian residences built in Millers Point/ Coodye by a publican property developer in the mid-nineteenth century, is one such terrace row. More than 150 years of occupation has seen this row fall in and out of favour. It has…

When a bird builds a nest, it gathers found materials and weaves these together into a haven for its offspring. Delicately assembled and fit for purpose, the nest is just big enough to hold its chicks until they are ready to fly, but no bigger. A recent addition to a house named Tanoa in a coastal suburb of Perth is described by the architects, Katherine Ashe and Marco Vittino, as “a nest.” On the face of it, this metaphor directly refers to the superbly crafted upper-level room now perched on top of a roughly 50-year-old house. However, Vittino Ashe did more than simply add a second storey: the brilliance of this project lies in its conception as a network of modest but impactful modifications across the site, tying together a…

When Mater approached Dennie Ditzel, daughter of Danish designers Jørgen and Nanna Ditzel, about remaking classic furniture from her parents’ archives with recycled materials, she was immediately interested. Founded in 2006, Mater seeks to make furniture production more sustainable. Mater and Dennie found the ideal collection for both that ambition and the archive project: Ocean, which comprises chairs, tables, lounges and benches made of plastic slats mounted on metal frames. A new material was engineered from recycled fishing nets, a move in keeping with the spirit of the original design (1955) and the Ditzels’ interest in innovative materials. The collection is made possible through Mater's partnership with Letbek, a plastic moulding company, and Plastix, a recycling plant that collects, cleans and processes ocean plastic. The collaboration contributed, if modestly, to…

Do you remember those ViewMaster gizmos from the 1950s? The equivalent cutting-edge of today’s Oculus headsets, they used stereo-slide images to give a convincing three-dimensional picture of a well-known landmark or place. Something about this recent house by Neeson Murcutt Neille has me thinking about the power of both paired vision and stereotypes. In this renovation of a double-storey Victorian villa in Armadale, simultaneous alignments of perspective between architect and client, and architect and architect, give a new dimension to a beloved but often formulaic residential pattern. How to adapt a grand house with its compartmental planning to fit contemporary preferences for fluid spaces connected to landscape? The task was to unravel a traditional plan compounded by a stereotypical 1990s extension that did nothing to use the existing house or…

Situated on the fringe of suburbia and bushland on Garigal country in Sydney’s northern beaches, Kabina is a self-assembled cabin that fulfils a contemporary desire for compact, versatile ways of living. Designed and produced by Facundo Ochoa, co-director of NODO Arquitectura y Naturaleza, in collaboration with cabinetmaker Nicolas Urien, Kabina exemplifies the concept of a “pandemic project,” being both an outcome of, and a response to, the lockdowns and concurrent themes of material shortage and the migration of city-dwellers to the country. The project exercises a resourceful use of material coupled with an innovative fabrication and assembly method that enables efficient dismantling of the cabin at the end of its use. As Facundo sees it, “That is the ultimate goal of sustainability: to put it back into a circular economy.…

Sydney Harbour’s bays and peninsulas create complex topographies within the city’s inner suburbs. Often ignored in town planning of old, extreme shifts in height are now inspiring new adaptations of disorganized cottages. Until recently, this house in Balmain was an unremarkable brick cottage on a double-width block. The home was perched too high above the street and poked out from the surrounding rooftops, while the vacant half of the site was held above a laneway by a publicly owned retaining wall. This topography many perceived as a burden – but in the hands of the right architect, it became a gift. Saha’s reworking of Balmain House has a simple plan. The cottage at the front has been retained for its bedrooms, bathroom and study, while a pavilion-like kitchen-and-living structure now…

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In 2005, my partner Margo and I were a few years out of university and working on the Sunshine Coast with Blackburne Jackson Architects and Gabriel Poole respectively. We were living at Sunrise Beach and very much enjoying our new lifestyle. We dreamed of buying land and designing our own house, and we had spent the preceding years taking on whatever extra work we could rustle up to save the necessary funds. Eventually, we had enough money to put down a deposit on a block of land at Mt Ninderry, a striking mountain, typical of the Sunshine Coast, rising among the cane fields to the west of Coolum. We were pinching ourselves: it was a north-facing site with views through a saddle in the north-west spur of Mt Ninderry toward…

The built environment of Cremorne in inner-suburban Melbourne is nothing short of chaotic – an eclectic mix of residential, commercial and industrial uses bounded by major roads and the Yarra River, and divided by the railway. The homeowner, enamoured with the hubbub of this local context, sought a modest, single-storey addition to elevate the amenity of her existing worker’s cottage and support her continued enjoyment of life within the increasingly densifying suburb. From the street, the old cottage – which occupies a minute, 156-square-metre site – is dwarfed by a looming, 12-storey commercial building at its rear. This unusual urban arrangement drove Figr to consider “how to activate underutilized space, how to leverage as much of the land as possible and how to provide a retreat within the busyness of…

Arcke principal Matt Kennedy’s creative journey with this riverfront site began as a careful study of a home designed by Kenneth Drewe in 1954. The first house built on the Indooroopilly reach of the Brisbane River at Chelmer, it became part of an enclave of mid-century -era homes that were built as new riverfront subdivisions opened during the 1950s. The home came on the market for the first time in 2018 and, drawn to its welcoming and understated character and lush landscape setting, the clients acquired it. The initial brief to Arcke was to calculate whether to renovate or rebuild. As investigations progressed, it became clear that flood and termite damage had taken a severe toll on the structure, forcing the difficult decision to demolish and rebuild. The original house…

K. is a writer. She wrote her first fiction novel during the three years it took to design and construct the extension to her house. By her own account, the house is not featured in her book. Nor are Grace Mortlock and Lindsay Mulligan from Other Architects, who designed and supervised the construction. The lengthy conversations over the dining room table that defined the project are also missing from its pages. Still, the cottage described in K.’s novel, “with its small square rooms, low ceilings, bare timber floorboards, add-on bathrooms and toilets outside,” seems intimately intertwined with the recent alteration to her home. The house’s history precedes K.’s tenure. It began as a six-room bungalow with a pyramidal roof of red corrugated iron that could have been built in Queensland…

“Perched precariously on thin steel rods in the treetops, this addition to a bathroom recalls childhood experiences of the tree house.” This succinct yet intriguing statement, taken from the 1992 Victorian Architecture Awards jury citation, reveals plenty about the appeal of Wye River House, a humble weekender cleaved to the hillside in a small coastal town along Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. Architect Col Bandy’s design is an intentionally lightweight structure that traverses the steep and heavily vegetated site, minimizing site disturbance while maximizing the home’s views of the ocean and the rugged Victorian coastline. Its efficient and effective design earned it a Merit Award for Outstanding Architecture from the Royal Australian Institute of Architects Victorian Chapter in 1992, and the house remains today as an example of a functional and…