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Tree Island | Carter Williamson Architects

Tree Island is a family home whose airy verticality transcends the limitations of its tight footprint and heritage context, using planning constraints as direct design opportunities. Elegantly balancing the protection of an existing cottage with the freedom to climb up against the adjacent warehouse conversion, its dramatic section is as rare as it is expansive, making of the most of its narrow inner–city site.

A breath–taking, light–filled void at the centre of the home unites the living, dining, and kitchen areas, playing host to a glorious fig tree planted in the kitchen island itself. Illuminated by a long, north–facing skylight, this double–height space cradles the most essential functions of its young family’s life as it brings the garden inside.

Tree House | DunnHillam Architecture + Urban Design

This house has as its central organising principles two things; the established garden and the kitchen table. During the previous 20 odd years of occupation of this house by the clients those two elements were almost the same thing. The majority of meals were eaten at a large table in the garden, and though the brief was to provide a more all–weather solution to dining there was also a desire to keep the connection and feel of being in the garden.

The design of this house has dual ambitions; to provide a quiet retreat for two busy professionals, and then at other times to welcome family and friends. Further, the house seeks to demonstrate a way of living that creates more gentle density in our established suburbs and to give an old house another couple of hundred years of useful life.

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