Inside a Modern Sanctuary Inspired by the Garden City

We really wanted to create a house that feels at one with its parkland environment, so that's both through the spaces themselves, the way that they flow and move and connect with that environment, but also in the very natural material palette, in the colours and the shades and the textures. This whole area was developed by the Victorian Housing Commission back in the 1940s, designed on the principles of the garden city of integrating home, parkland and private garden landscape, and you can really see this here in Park Crescent in Williamstown North, which is just west of the Melbourne Central Business District. When Beck and Richard came to us, they were the owners of this quite beautiful 1940s home, but it wasn't as connected to the outdoors as it could be and they really wanted to open up to the outdoor spaces more. One of the key design challenges as we saw it was how to continue the qualities of Park Crescent while still giving Beck and Richard a great private sanctuary in their own backyard, but for that backyard not to close itself off entirely. We worked with Beck and Richard to strike the right balance between giving a little bit of landscape back to the streetscape, but also creating that sanctuary for them. I suppose in every project you're looking for the clarity of an idea that is going to make sense to the site and the people living here. In this case I really feel like there are two key drivers in this project. It's the parkland environment and it's Beck and Richard's interest in art and the confluence of those two things really makes this project quite unique. We try to distill those two forces down into something which is as clear and simple as it can be. Approaching the house you immediately see the original house with this curious little extension that almost sits to the side of it which is the art studio. Then stepping inside you're stepping into Beck and Richard's study space and as you turn to your left you're immediately presented with this stretch diagonal that connects the old house to the new part of the house and on a property that's relatively small where the space is very functional but modest there's this great moment, quite exciting moment of generosity that kind of cuts right through and that axis draws a line between study gallery and living spaces. Coming down into the new part of the house this is where you start seeing those spaces swelling and pinching as required, swelling to accommodate a table, pinching to create a threshold between dining and living. You then look back towards the original house you can see that there's an existing window that used to be the exterior of the house it's now inside. When you leave a project behind you hand it over to the clients there are certain things about the project that stay with you that you carry on into your future work and in this one simple as it is it's the living space, the lounge space at the end of the house that it's this great little spot where at the end of your journey through the house you land and from there you have this great outlook back into the rest of the outdoor spaces, the rest of the living spaces, you can see everything but you're perfectly kind of cozy and contained and I think that space just has a really lovely quality to it and one that I think as an office we often find ourselves trying to recreate in some ways in other projects. The new bathroom actually used to be a small bedroom, it's now a large bathroom. In the bedroom we've provided some new robes and really maintained a sense of openness to the study and the rest of the house. In developing the material palette for this project we were very keen to reflect that quality of parkland and you can see it in the colours and textures and tones of particularly the interior but also the exterior palette. The hero is the green bagged brick, this is really the first time we tried it and it's always a bit of an experiment getting the recipe right. The beauty of having a pigmented bagging is that you still retain all the natural colour variation of the brick in behind the bagging so you get this beautiful kind of field of pale greens and deep greens and has a very natural quality to it that you won't get if you simply paint a brick and we like to think it has something of a grotto-like feel to it which speaks to the the green shadiness of the natural landscape. Complementing the pigmented green brick we've got timbers, polished concrete and really just letting the natural materials come to the form with their patina to kind of lend the project that kind of sense of variation that you might see in the natural world. We're really keen to create that sense of generous threshold between the living spaces, the private garden courtyard and the street, the generous awning canopy over the doors and then beneath that the great big arc of bluestone crazy paving which doesn't quite register with the awning overhead so you get this nice sense of quite organic kind of bleeding from from inside to out and then there's the studio itself which informally defines a boundary between the garden and the streetscape. So we're really working with the elements of paving, awning and studio to establish a sense of transition and threshold between house and streetscape. The art studio replaces what used to be a shed on the boundary effectively and is now this beautiful little space that looks out onto the street through a curious porthole window. It's a little sanctuary away from the house for an art practice that also enjoys the life of Park Crescent moving by. One of my favourite things about this house is just the the sense of space, the way you step into the house and it opens up, contrasts back down, the way it flows from one area to the next very naturally and fluidly and yet the way each of those spaces along the journey still are defined enough to hold you. It's a really hard thing to communicate with words. I mean describing the qualities of the space is a tricky thing to put into words and I'm always disarmed in revisiting this house by the qualities that it does have because in the meantime I'm seeing it in plan and in photos as everybody else does but there's something about this place and visiting it where it really comes together.