Year: 2024
Photography: Clinton Weaver
Landscape Architect: Tarn Studio
Builder: Rosato Projects
Country: Gadigal Land
A home for an artist. A home that may intimately house one, and at other times a family of five.
The project critiques the typical floor plan of contemporary home. Rather than providing a 3-4 bedroom home, the design centres around a series of connected and flexible spaces that can be inhabited in multiple ways.
Designed as an enfilade, the plan presents an interconnected group of rooms arranged in a row, with each room opening into the next.
Velvet curtains and sliding panels close off ‘rooms’ from others when privacy is needed. At all other times, the home is essentially a single room with a singular central axis providing circulation down the middle and occupied spaces at the edges. Visibility is provided from the front of the house to the rear garden.
North-south cross-flow ventilation is provided on both floors, with no artificial cooling in the house. Two fireplaces (one existing) provide heating during cooler months.
A polycarbonate ‘lid’ sits atop existing rough bagged-brick walls to create a double height kitchen/sitting room overlooking the garden. A sleeping loft sits within part of the double-height room, overlooking the living spaces below through operable timber panels.
The design of the home fosters family relationships, and decidedly opts against segregated rooms. The project challenges conventional norms of dwelling – offering different individual and collective moments through the organisation of space. A home designed and built for its value to the owner, and not the resale value of some future unknown occupant.
A sustainable home that adds very little and removes even less.