A Tight Inner City Site That Borrows the Gardens Around It

When you start designing on sites like this they're always very tight. There's overshadowing, overlooking, inner city living, planning requirements mean that you've got to be very strategic about your form placing. When we sort of mapped it out initially the yard isn't going to be the largest of yards and everyone has these small pockets in this area. Everyone has these small gardens and if you sort of borrowed from each other you can feel like an expanded garden. Arbot Park is an inner city suburb between St Kilda and the city of Melbourne. This particular site is one street back from the bay so it's a beachside suburb, really mostly Victorian buildings in terms of the building stock. Most of them are heritage listed in terms of the facades and the streetscape so it's quite an intact streetscape. It's got quite strong regulations around what you can build around that with the extensions that inevitably happen to the back of these original facades. There's a series of bluestone lanes which connect the houses and it's quite a pedestrianised area so they often offer you a shortcut from one place to another through the bluestone lanes behind the houses. The opportunity for us here is to express the architecture on the front facade. We sort of held down by heritage restrictions and things like that but the back lane we see that as a real opportunity to engage with the urban streetscape and the development of that. Very early on we realised that we had to put the building along the north side to deal with the easement issues which meant that the garden is on the south. We were very keen to make sure that we had glazing along that north side so we introduced this slot window that looks out to the neighbour's trees and there's quite a strong line of trees right there and they become part of this house and this garden and this experience. It's that sort of tantalising glimpse of the gardens over the top of the wall that lends to this garden as well but also making sure you felt private and protected from that. So the garden wall is relatively high and it's masonry so that wraps from outside and all the way into the house. We deliberately set the facades in on two sides to get the ability to get glass there so you do sort of set up these frames and these views. I think at that moment where we did push the facade in it became more of a pavilion in a garden than a straightforward extension. The wall garden is really about the expansion of space, just that perception of the space continuing out into the garden and I think that is successful when you get these tight blocks, it works really well. When we first met the clients they were living in the house and the back extension was poorly done, poorly organised, very skinny space with bedrooms off to one side, proportionally out of balance with no connection to the garden. The straightforward program of kitchen dining living was there to undo what had been done and give them a much more positive experience of living here and also adding a bedroom and a retreat upstairs. It was a fairly standard brief in terms of house extensions. To fit it all on the trick was to massage and be very economical about space and be efficient, no wastage. The stair is always the organisational element where you put that dictates a whole lot of things. We also sunk the building quite low into the ground so one that helps with planning and heritage with heights and getting ceiling volumes, the other as it does give you a very seamless sort of flow from inside to out. The house didn't originally have a pool and the house extended to the back wall and the clients asked to add a swimming pool. The idea of the house as a sanctuary I think is something that came out of that and the house as you know sort of being a little bit self-sufficient and a place of retreat. So we had to then fit a pool into already quite a tight block without compromising the flow from inside to outside of the house. So we actually just shortened the living room a little bit and put the pool in there between that and the back fence and I think it's actually a very nice scenario because it means that that distinction of inside and outside is further eroded because the garden kind of wraps around the back of the house. So the original brief was very much to not touch the front of the house so there was a budgetary limit on the project and those front three rooms which are now used as a home office, a bedroom and a guest room, they're good size Victorian rooms but what the house didn't have was a single generous space to live in and the opportunity here was to provide that light and spacious living space where the whole family can be together which the old house really didn't have. I think Victorian terraces often didn't prioritise connection to gardens, they often have the utilitarian wing at the back of the house with very little connection out and I think that's been the largest shift to how we design now and understanding that it's a positive thing to bring inside. And I think it's also how we entertain, the kitchen's all very open, they entertain a lot here, they have friends over, the kids are always here in the pool and it's a casual way I think of having people to your home. So I think it enables you to be cooking and serving and being outside and inside and I think that's really important. I think simplicity is born out of the restraint in the material palette and being rigorous about choosing a material that in some instances can flow from inside to out and others it can wrap in and under, like the timber cladding becoming the timber ceiling that then curves up to the windows. And I think as well offsetting that simplicity with the complexity of texture, so there's really no plasterboard in the addition. Everything has its own inherent variation in it, they're all offering something textural which I think is really important in a simple design because it does need to feel like home, it does need to feel like it will age. We're only ever going to get a certain amount of north light into this space because of the the orientations that we're dealing with with the block but the light can fall on the garden wall and reflect back into the house so you're getting that bounce of light from outside to in which lights the house in a really quite a diffuse way rather than the direct light coming in. Between the old and new house where it steps down there's a real clear break and then you step down into the new part so it's quite a clear distinction between the the new and the old and when you're in the living part of the house the demarcation between inside and outside is quite fluid. There's that generosity and that tantalizing glimpse of the trees or the vines just sort of coming over the garden wall.