The brief for the project for design directors David Stevenson and Thierry Lacoste was to restore the existing heritage cottage, which had become derelict over time. Sergio Corona, project architect at Lacoste + Stevenson, says the firm wasn’t told what the end use would be. Some initial concepts by the City of Sydney did include cafes and art galleries, but essentially, the restoration had to be flexible for any use.
The main changes to the cottage were structural as the existing timber structure and masonry had started to rot away. “So we opened up the rooms and knocked out a few walls to try and make the space feel a little bit grandiose, because there were so many smaller rooms that were very specific to the time like a meat pantry room,” Corona says.
The timber rot was a result of the cottage being built on a rock near water, which meant water was and still is continually moving underneath the house. This caused considerable moisture problems, particularly for the flooring.
To try and combat the problem and prevent new timber floorboards from warping, stormwater pumps were placed on the lower ground and subfloor sands were introduced to keep air flowing.
“We injected all of the sandstone walls that were touching the rock foundation with a silicone that doesn’t allow water to penetrate into the sandstone. Water was actually getting into the house through the walls, so there was a lot of rising damp. Basically, all of the lower ground has been injected at the base of the building to stop water coming from the ground going up into the wall,” Corona says.
All the floorboards were replaced, along with structural timber joints underneath the floorboards and stairs. On the ground level, the architects used steel to support some of the walls. But finding suitable timber which was durable, hard wearing and looked like something which would have been used in the cottage when it was first built was problematic.
“In regards to things like the renders, we used traditional lime based rendering on the walls. The ceiling is a whole different story and the ceiling was not plasterboard either. Instead, it was rendered with mesh and hemp and lime based rendering,” Corona says.
Around 20 years ago, the roof was replaced with slate, but the house was leaking in some areas. Corona says slate can usually last around 100 years, but the slate on the cottage was so bad professional slaters said it was the cheapest they had ever seen.
“So it opened up a whole pandora’s box of do you either fix the roof or do you replace the whole roof and put new slate on. We ended up having to replace the roof because there was no guarantee that any work from the roof would last any particular time,” Corona says. This meant the roof was completely stripped back and relined with new slate, which was a major blow to the budget.
There was also damage on the ceiling which was carried out while the building was being cleaned up for an assessment. As a result, the original cornices and ceiling were damaged.
“So it existed, but then due to miscommunication, it was pulled out just before construction began, so we had to revisit the idea of redoing all that cornice work and ornamentation along the edges of the ceiling. There were small bits that remained, but the guys that did the work made their own jigs to set the plaster cornices. It was really time consuming work, but beautiful as a finished product,” Corona says.
And instead of putting up sheets of plasterboard on the ceiling, timber battens were put in, which was overlaid with chicken wire. Then a coat of rough grout with hemp fibre through it was applied, a second coat and the finished coat. The whole process took several weeks.
In order to retain some of the heritage aspects of the cottage, the architects organised paint scrapes to find out what colours were the original. Because the house had been illegally inhabited, squatters had painted over and graffitied parts of the cottage’s walls. Once they did discover original paint colours, they sealed sections with a clear sealant to give future visitors an idea of the house’s history.
Lacoste + Stevenson also used mineral paint in order to let the building breathe, something which the firm had not used before. “If you put a plastic paint on it, it’s going to trap the moisture and it also has a glossy, plastic look.
“They would have used mineral paints back in the day and it just means the concrete render that goes over the brick can breathe so you get a much softer finish. Some of the people that are good at that are Porters,” Corona says.
In the end, working with builder Gary Waller, who has experience with a number of heritage projects, taught the firm the most about restoration work. “It was quite a learning process and we learnt a lot from the builder more than anyone else because of his experience. He guided us in choosing particular materials and doing things particular ways so we would get quite a genuine finished product.”
