Project: Wooloowin House
Architects: Nielsen Jenkins
Design Team: Lachlan Nielsen, Morgan Jenkins, Nicholas Russell, Kelsey Homer, Laura McConaghy
Engineering: AD. STRUCTURE, AD Structure
Landscape Design: Jonathan Kopinski, Nielsen Jenkins
Location: Brisbane, Australia
Area: 300 m²
Year 2019
Photography: Shantanu Starick
The Wooloowin House sits on a very steep, west facing site with distant views towards the Samford Valley.
The inherent tension between the distant mountain view and the ferocity of the summer sun from this direction led to a strategy of enabling a much more dynamic occupation of the site than is typical in these buildings.
Two new ‘public’ rooms have been created; one internal room has been carved away through careful subtraction within the existing building envelope; and the other external room has been defined by the addition of a new framing arbour to the west, and a slender two-storey screening element to the south which shields the existing pool from the neighbouring block of units.
The project stitches together small additions with the existing structure, slab, pool and roof. This new arrangement has enabled a new series of grounded spaces that allow the family to occupy different parts of the site at different times of the day – retreating back into the undercroft spaces when the sun is at its harshest, and then moving outwards to the view as the sun turns to night.
