The Cottage School | Taylor and Hinds Architects

The Cottage School is a unique, small, independent, secular, community primary school. It is located in Queen Street, in Kangaroo Bay. The school prioritises the environment as a critical framework for learning.
Cohabiting a series of Federation weatherboard worker’s cottages, the School has established a unique pedagogical structure which borrows heavily from the intimacy and domesticity of its setting.
A new Green Cottage ‘addition’ was conceived as a unifying element between the existing external teaching and play environments, and the domestic scale of the original cottage. A verandah forms an extension of the educational realm, for woodwork, seating, and water play. Along this covered edge, an operable facade serves as a ‘streetscape’ for displays, and encourages imaginative play at thresholds. The sensorial environment is carefully orchestrated, through subtle acoustic and lighting. The new interiors are composed through a singular, warm and calming palette, which ‘backgrounds’ the experience of learning.

TERROIR Hobart Office | TERROIR

As the impacts of climate change are now felt in real time, the idea of sustainability in architecture is being questioned. TERROIR aim to challenge sustainability in Architecture through the concepts explored within their own office fit out in lutruwita / Hobart.

Occupying a space within an abandoned mid-century office fit out, the design is a cannibalisation and reappropriation of what was already there. This project is an experiment that challenges the paradox of ‘sustainable architecture’. This project may be small in size, but heralds a disproportionately large manifesto for a different sort of practice that is more and more urgent to embrace. Its lessons are already informing our practice’s larger projects in our quest to continue making places which support the interactions of people and place, but in a way that uses less resources than ever before.

Taroona House | Archier

On a steep and densely forested hill overlooking Hinsby Beach, three rectangular structures assembled like tree branches that fall down the hill and pile on top of one another. Utilising prefabricated elements the main house consists of two of the ‘branches’ stacked at a right angle, with the third, an art studio, separated by an outdoor deck. Segmentation of the house allows expansion and contraction according to the number and needs of occupants, reducing conditioned floor area and thus reducing energy usage. Cantilevering forms create openings between the structures and the hillside, offering pathways for local wildlife and a concealed entry for the main house, below the upper floor. Interior spaces feature a dark timber palette amplifying the activity of the bushland surrounding the house, while the dwelling is wrapped in a prefabricated timber window system, minimising steel and maximising the connection to the powerful Derwent River.

Suite Shed | alsoCAN

We retain traditional facades and streetscapes, but what about backyards?

The existing building had been a sleep–out in a working backyard dotted with fruit trees. We wanted to keep this quality and this purpose.

From the outside, the result retains the same profile. Nearly all the existing structure has been kept, but now insulated and wrapped so its waterproof and warm. From the inside all the studwork, cladding and roofing remain, so it looks just like it did before with new fittings.

The new building adds no new floor area. However, we now have a larger bedroom, a refitted bathroom and a large space for living.

A critical part of the design was to make the building fully accessible. There are handrails around the outside of the rooms with sensor–activated lighting, along with more generally accessible aspects such as wheelchair–accessible benchtops, rails, a shower seat and talking kitchen appliances.

St.LukesHealth Flagship Store | TERROIR

The best intentions of organisations can be betrayed by the banality of their key public interactions in their customer service centre. This critical opportunity to choreograph a set of relations with customers is often blighted by a fitout that is as unsustainable as they are uninspiring.

StLukesHealth are an extraordinary organisation, one that prides themselves on being uniquely Tasmanian with an ambitious vision for Tasmania to become the healthiest island in the world.

This dual sense – distinctly Tasmanian but also healthy, safe and well–nurtured – led to the concept for their new flagship store to be a gathering space formed by a giant tree hollow. Blackheart Sassafras, a most unique and recognisable Tasmanian timber, and a ‘hollow’, a natural form of refuge in our forests. A meeting point between StLukesHealth and their community, the hollow inspires imagination and talks to a healthier and poetic connection to our island state.

St Virgil’s College – New Year 11 and 12 Facilities | Tim Penny Architecture + Interiors Pty Ltd

The year 11 and 12 facility provides new contemporary education spaces that are anchored into the 1961 campus plan, expanding and reinventing new external spaces. It is designed to optimise learning and provide seamless contemporary pedagogy, whilst providing a community asset that includes a great place to watch footy.

Skellig House | Crump Architects

In Skellig House, Crump Architects have created a dramatic shadow in the landscape that creates a harmonious blend of both treehouse and boathouse. The lightweight structure with a dark skin of Shou Sugi Ban hides in the bush on a rocky cliff looking north across the Derwent.
The name is inspired by Skellig Michael, a rocky outcrop off the Irish coast. The owners family is from the west coast of Ireland and felt a strong resemblance between this area and the wild Atlantic coast. The design creates a warm and comforting refuge in this wild southern environment, with a spectacular panoramic view.
The key challenge was to optimise an awkward and constrained suburban block. The final outcome maximises the use of the design envelope and effectively edits out the neighbours to create a low–impact, low profile structure that uses the available space to create privacy and a sense of expanse.

River’s Edge Building, University of Tasmania | Wardle

River’s Edge is a learning, teaching and research building located at the edge of the North Esk River /lakekeller in the University of Tasmania’s Inveresk Precinct. Providing flexible, collaborative teaching and research spaces for students and staff from Humanities, Social Sciences, Law and Business disciplines. It’s a contemporary learning environment where communities of students and staff gather for meaningful exchange.

The ground floor is organised around a series of brick–pods, located at the edges of a lively central atrium designed to bring the community together. Spaces between them frame viewing portals out to the surrounding landscape.

River’s Edge celebrates its position within a post–industrial site with references to structural expression and robust materials. The building adapts and optimises industrial vocabulary for enhanced solar orientation and thermal performance, concepts of Country are appropriately embedded in the design and consideration has successfully targeted embodied carbon reductions in construction, operation, and end–of–life impact.

Regent Street Extension | Preston Lane

Located on the roundabout of a suburban arterial road in the heart of Sandy Bay, the extension steps up the slope of the corner site as it opens to the North enabling privacy for the occupants and distance from the noise of the road below.
Preston Lane was engaged to modernise the property to provide spaces for a growing family currently residing in Singapore. The extension included the revitalisation of the existing character home (back to its original form) and a substantial rear extension. An existing two–level extension was removed as part of the works to reveal the original dwelling and to enable a better relationship between the internal and external spaces within the new works.
A new entry has been created off Alexander Street, providing greater connection to the homes new Living spaces housed within the new works, whilst a subtle side entry from Regent Street has been maintained.

Pedder Street House | Bence Mulcahy

This 1920s cottage renovation and extension better connects the interior with the north–facing rear garden for a couple and their young child.

The well-loved cottage with double-fronted facade of white stucco and asymmetrical gables has an informal and endearing character.

The brief, delivered in a new extension which continues the cottage’s hipped roof, includes master-bedroom, ensuite, kitchen, dining, living, powder-room and laundry.

Plan and section are tightly worked to yield a playful arrangement of internal spaces of varying floor and ceiling levels, aligned with terraced courtyard and garden, and a discrete second storey master-bedroom and ensuite.

Demolition of the rear of the cottage connects the original interior to the garden and maximises daylight.

The extension, on the north-eastern quadrant of the site, opens to the luscious garden and courtyard. The interior softy shaded by an overhead pergola and external trellised green wall.