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Culburra Beach House | Virginia Kerridge Architect

The site was a never built upon piece of land situated beachfront at Culburra. The landscape is windswept, with low native foliage with a large setback to the beach consisting of planted sand dunes.

The shapes of the trees are bent over and distorted by constant winds along the coast. The design of the house responds to this with a roof shape that gracefully ascends and flattens towards the beach. It is a house that becomes a safe retreat and a place of serenity amidst the storm.

The landscape design is by Jane Irwin Landscape Architects.

Blue Mountains House | Anthony Gill Architects

The project involved the substantial renovation of an existing 70’s kit home and the construction of a guest house adjacent.
The site is environmentally sensitive and classified as flame zone.
The existing house is modified to suit the client, becoming the family’s second home.

The guest house, excluded from the family’s regular use, is conceived as an extension of the site’s existing landscape. Acting as a large boulder or mass, it encourages the external traversing of the structure connecting its three separate external stairs with an original network of pathways on the site. This helps to absorb the building into the family’s realm.

This new structure enabled the site to be reorganised providing a buffer from the street and a new private, north facing entry courtyard that is the centre of the new home. It provides a place to gather, protected from the near constant southwesterly wind.

Arcadia | Plus Minus Design

With no interest in architecture, our clients intended to commission a project home builder. Fortunately, their son convinced them otherwise.

The approach balanced heritage and reality, with original features restored when possible and no Pinterest driven gimmickry.

Skylight shafts were placed between original plaster details. An extension and new laneway structure provide parking and new accommodation.

A new roof sits behind the existing tiled roof and houses a new attic with perforated screens for shade, privacy and security.

An unexpected gift was the discovery of sandstone bedrock which was flooded to create a calming pond.

Ground level includes comfortable/accessible accommodation while additional multi function bedrooms accommodate frequent family visits.

The design also accommodates a lifetime’s accumulation of bric-a-brac and the home is now truly lived in.

From the overall scheme to the finest detail, our team has successfully negotiated 100 year old materials with contemporary amenity to see Arcadia into its next chapter.

Dent Street Double | Curious Practice

Dent Street Double is a set of mirrored townhouses in the popular beachside suburb of Merewether where this typology of densification is tried and tested en masse—with little success. For our buildings with long, narrow sites oriented north toward the street, an interesting challenge emerged: organising the plan to create equally comfortable, light-filled spaces for daily coastal living in each dwelling.

A low-pitched gable roof stretches out toward the street, a gesture of protection and a reference to original weatherboard cottages of the area. Ground floor organisation provides access around each building, bringing a practical consideration of living patterns like coming home from the beach or shopping, doing the washing, relaxing on a weekend with family or finding a comfortable place to read. Overall, the strategy to produce two simple dwellings that had good amenity, were friendly to neighbours and supported a lifestyle congruent to place was successful.

Aru House | Curious Practice

Weatherboard cottages built in the first half of the twentieth century were often generous at the front and restricted at the rear, with their relationship to prevailing breezes, appropriate orientation and gardens being a low priority. Aru House (Awabakal word for “insect”) plugs-in a series of carefully balanced sensory amplifiers and connectors to just such a cottage in order for a long-ignored sense of place to re-emerge.

These sympathetic augmentations to the existing dwelling allow the building to become responsive to seasonal living patterns with a newfound sense of contextual sensitivity. All the new, and old, programs of the house overlap and borrow from each other, becoming more flexible and generous, enabling efficient planning and an ability to focus on quality over quantity. As a result, the value of the project is measured in joy and delight through the way materials are crafted, light is choreographed and edges are blurred.

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