Award – Residential Alterations & Additions Category
Victorian Architecture Awards 2004
Winner – Residential Interior Category
National Dulux Colour Awards 2004
Client Brief
This project is a new addition to the rear of an existing Victorian weatherboard house in Brunswick. Our client came to us with a brief to replace a previously built addition, with new living, kitchen/dining and bathroom/laundry spaces to serve the existing bedroom and lounge areas of the original house. He wanted these facilities to resemble an independent annexe – different from the original house, but with a distinct relationship to the yard area at the rear.
Design Response
Whilst our response generated a number of subtle variations on the theme of ‘the outdoors’, deliberate attempts were made to unify the scheme through the use of a dynamic form, select materials and colour.
A new bay window to the rear provides a still place from which to observe the garden – enhanced through the use of clear openable lower panes and green tinted/mirrored upper panes which give the space a more intimate sense of scale.
Establishing a sense of equivalence with the original house was achieved by observing the iconic function of fireplaces and chimneys which characterise and anchor together each of the period rooms in the retained front portion of the house. As a counterpoint, we re-joined these notions of hearth, mantelpiece and chimney into a single iconic joinery piece situated in the centre of the new annexe.
The adoption of Colorbond cladding meant that a low maintenance and cost effective cladding system could be combined with an ability to control the appearance of the scheme without visible fixings whilst minimising the distraction of pronounced shadows from capping flashings.
Brunswick Annexe Design Specifications
Services Provided
Full Services
Architect
Workshop Architecture
People
Project Team: Stephen Staughton, James Staughton, Eliza Blair Photography: Shannon McGrath
Housing bins, bikes, garden supplies and an air conditioning unit, this mirror clad shed visually dissolves, whilst intriguing and confounding the viewer from the street.
A house / gallery defined by a curated circulation path past an extensive collection of books, artworks and artefacts, punctuated by iconic neighbourhood views.
