The Cecil Street House project was a renovation and extension to a single fronted, double storey Victorian terrace house in South Melbourne. The existing house was long and narrow, and consisted of a series of dark, dilapidated rooms planned in a linear configuration.
This passively designed extension and renovation creates a warm, robust, family and pet friendly space, while protecting a mature Magnolia x soulangeana tree and maximising garden area.
Sitting on a 5.5m wide site, and bounded by 6m high walls and behind an existing shop, this 3 bedroom Ascot Vale House in Melbourne’s inner west has deployed a number of clever strategies to transcend its constraints.
For this 1,012 sq ft HDB apartment, the challenge was to introduce industrial elements while retaining a polished look. Some of the elements incorporated were white brick walls, cement screed surfaces, a magnetic wall at the kitchen entrance for art and messages, and well-appointed lighting and furniture.
Upon entering this dynamic space, one’s mind might not immediately jump to the quaint yet historic past embedded into the bones of this Battery St. location. In fact, if not for the humble design elements of Douglas fir beams, high ceilings, and stall like enclosures, there would be no indication of its original purpose.
Planar House is a radical exercise in horizontality, aspect commonly explored in the projects of the studio. Discreetly inserted in the highest point of the plot and favoring the existing topography, its presence is most strongly felt in the footprint rather than volumetrically. An extensive line in an open landscape.
The project was born from the idea to link the different spaces of the house by means of a unifying element. This concept was materialized employing a suspended ceiling that communicated both ends of the apartment and overlaid the existing elements and the new intervention.
The empty and forgotten semi-basement space in the 19th century Ljubljana corner building, which faces the riverside and a rarely frequented stairs-street, housed diverse ventures in the past, from a local butcher shop to a wholesale wine store.
