This Architect Solved a Dark Home With One Simple Move

By having a house that is framed around a courtyard allows the house to be focused around a beautiful garden space. You can open the doors and you can very simply enjoy the sense of being in a garden within your own living space. So it's both an experiential thing and also a way of living that's both a ritual where you understand the way that you live in the house based on the seasons, but it's also this really functional thing where it's a very low-tech and very simple sustainable way of living. The site is Row House in Ascot Vale. The biggest challenge for the site was the fact that it was a south-facing backyard. We knew that there was an opportunity to create a property that had privacy and a northerly outlook and also its own beautiful views to its own garden. Jason and Chantel had lived in Ascot Vale for 17 or 18 years and had decided that after being here for a long time they'd found their favourite little part of the world in Melbourne. They weren't keen to move on somewhere else. So the brief really was quite simple and that was that they had an existing two-bedroom home. They wanted to improve that to become a three-bedroom home and fundamentally they wanted to be able to entertain from home and make their home a place that was enjoyable for them to be in every day and to invite their friends into their home every day. So it was about creating a really simple and beautiful living environment that was very functional but also really well designed to interact between living spaces and outdoor garden. The original house facade is retained almost exactly as it is. We have maintained the front two rooms of the existing house with the original corridor. So you come in the front door, there's a guest bedroom to the left, the second room which is technically a second bedroom is utilised as Jason's home office and then transition into the third room, a very lovely bathroom for guests with a laundry within a cupboard. The hallway is interrupted by a couple of windows at designated locations to let the beautiful easterly morning light coming through and views to the landscape and then the hallway opens up to the living area which begins with lounge room to the north and then descends into kitchen and meals area. Based on the dimensions we know ergonomically what's going to work well so by containing a lot of the functional utility to one side and containing it so transitioning from living room joinery through to kitchen is the most efficient use of space and then at the back is all the functional storage fridges all contained into a full wall of joinery. The doors to the courtyard are designed to just slide away but what was a key decision in the design process was that we wanted the courtyard and the living area to feel as one outdoor room so it was designed to be a very immersive and generous space so we were trying to work out how to make it expand and become one room as easily and as quickly as possible. Mornings here are really beautiful in the house and it just means that you know you can open it up and you can sit in your lounge room enjoy reading the paper and you're part of the courtyard. It's a really simple palette inside we knew that we would be going to a robust burnished slab we wanted timber joinery to bring warmth into the interior and then with contemporary construction detail and texture just gets stripped away. The notion of using a tile that is smaller and modular and actually brings texture and depth to a design was pretty important to the whole concept. And little moments of brass detail there's the wire mesh of the liquor cabinet the lights and the joinery pools and bits and pieces. Going upstairs you arrive at a landing you can either walk forward and north into a little bedroom space where the bed is contained or you can turn right into the walk-in robe and then through a cheeky little secret door into the ensuite which faces south and looks back towards the city. Like all of our projects we design our houses from inside out. We've always got very key ideas about where we want natural light and how we want views frame views to landscape from inside the house that's kind of integral to a sense of retreat and also experience in an inner city home. So we would design the spaces with an idea of how we want landscape to be a part of the experience but we would always be collaborating with a landscape architect. When we did our own modelling we realised that there was an opportunity to make this key move of moving all of the extension to the back of the property and move the private open space to the centre of the property which was the division between old and new that was flanked by a corridor. Which then led us to start to look at the idea of this diagram of old secret garden sanctuary and then new double storey extension. So we really started to then think about what that meant as an address to the side street. Council Heritage were really interested in the idea of it being a reference to the old traditional homes of the Moonee Valley area which was in Victorian areas when horse-drawn transport was the means you would have your primary house and then your stable structure. So they really really liked the fact that we were addressing the air street with retaining and restoring the existing house we were creating an entrance to air street and then this new addition was proportional and relevant and a reference to a stable structure. The key principles in our work is to design from the inside out and to think through that sequence of that ritual that daily ritual of living in the home that sequence of experiences of how you move through the home and how you create opportunities for outlook to natural light and landscape. I think that is fundamental to all of our projects and I just think the more we do projects we're becoming less interested in excessive architecture and more interested in robust and really well considered well detailed architecture that's suitable to the Australian climate and it's beautiful but it's practical. We like things that are designed to last and unashamedly Australian.