8 Yard House

The brief, with a full agenda of living spaces demanded a significant volume. Orientation considerations push the volume to the south boundary. The resulting envelope suggested an overly linear form.

In response, bisecting divisions have been introduced to correct room proportions and to shift spatial orientation. The linear extrusion is transformed to a chain of elements each claiming their own outside space. The divisions are thick, materially homogenous and march uninterrupted through the external skin to become courtyard defining garden walls.

By applying the streetscape rhythm to parts of its proportions and fenestration, the street façade seeks to both empathise with context and yet address the disruptive site width. Accommodating a bedroom garden courtyard in direct proximity to the street, the brick surface softens and dissolves from a referenced formal composition to a more ambiguous receding curved hit-and-miss screen element, while still holding to material continuity.

Front cellular rooms, echoing adjoining terrace patterns, straddle either side of a passage, supporting the referencing objectives of the façade. Further back into the site, principal living spaces are displaced along the boundary in sequence, progressively more private in nature. The pool is forward in the sequence, with its play of water-reflected light calming your arrival. This also relieves the rear garden, allowing the lounge room expansive outlook and a spacious backyard area for kids to play.

The lounge room is stepped down and terminates the linear room array, bringing the level of seated repose down to the garden surface.

8 yard spaces hang off the rooms. Their functions specialise along the lines of the spaces they adjoin and offer a diversity of outdoor enjoyments; cooking, eating, swimming, sunny repose, leafy outlook, city views. Clues of visual continuity, such as wall height datums and surface finish, work to break down distinctions between inside and out.

Kids bedrooms in dormitory format consume the upstairs area. The sunny north-oriented passage space has bigger ambitions than just access, however. Punctuated by the same bisecting divisions as below and edged with built-in seating and linked study booths, the light-filled space seeks to draw kids out of their lairs, advocating sibling interaction above the solitary screen activities that may dominate. Communal washing arrangements reinforces this social ideal.

The upper northern edge of the building presents a considerable challenge to resolve conflicting goals of light admission, environmental tempering and control of overlooking. Aluminum screens with planter bases set up a light-filtering leafy green intermediary layer beyond the glass line. Planting opportunities like this are set up throughout the house ensuring the ongoing ageing process is also a greening process.