From the architect:
This project re-invigorates the life of an existing Queenslander cottage in inner city Paddington.
The original home sits prominently at the street edge of a steeply sloping site, overlooked by neighbours. The quest was to extend the home to provide new living and communal spaces and a master bedroom zone, while capturing a sense of serene privacy and retreat.
The new work mitigates the issues of the steep site by creating a series of platforms and courtyards that expand the functioning ground plane. Spatial planning is carefully considered to create an intriguing geometry of interlinking planes that celebrate and embrace a raised grass courtyard on the northern edge. Volumes expand and contract in a delightful sense of play, with barrel vaults defining significance. Views to neighbouring houses are edited while portions of the sky, trees and mountains are carefully framed through a series of peepholes and voids.
The owners are committed minimalists, and this drove the aesthetic of an elegantly bleached palette and stripped-back surfaces. The neutral interior surfaces subtly reflect and play with natural light, while exterior walls of sundrenched white appear as a chiseled cyclorama emphasising the vivid colours of landscape, sky and water. The soothing restrained palette is taken up in the re-organisation of the old cottage which is now dedicated to the family’s three children, with guest accommodation adjacent to the ground level garage.
