Wangal, Bedigal and Kameygal people of the Eora Nation
New South Wales
Shed House, built for a couple and their three children, is a place that harmoniously blends work and home life with landscape. The couple have a passion for making furniture and have entwined their professional and domestic life by jointly operating a fabrication/design business. Shed House provides a balance for their lifestyle by conceptualising a house over two distinct levels, arranged with deliberate adjacencies and separations. The design emphasises rationality and legibility, while introducing a central courtyard as a counterpoint that brings in the ephemeral qualities of the surrounding landscape, seasons and weather. From the imposed order, juxtaposed with natural phenomena, a liberating atmosphere is created for daily life.
Award for Residential Architecture – Houses (New)
Shed House, in Sydney’s Earlwood, promotes an alternative housing model for our suburbs. It presents a work-live, environmentally responsive housing type set to change our suburbs for the better.
Accommodating the needs of a family’s furniture business on site, Breakspear Architects have fashioned a house that pushes beyond the typical.  The ground floor, a workshop space, is adaptable for family uses, parties and guests. The house itself is located at the first floor with a unique floorplate – a cruciform of living spaces arranged around a central courtyard with bedrooms at each corner. The plan provides for windows to all rooms at front and rear – a masterstroke in planning suggesting a new kind of terrace house arrangement, repeatable across a suburb.
The house is exquisitely detailed with all attention and no fuss. It’s a house that puts forward a positive alternative to the future development of our suburbs.
We love our Shed house. It has changed our lives. It’s beautiful to live and work around the central courtyard, always being able see each other through the garden, being able to feel together yet separate.