18/06/2024
This project for a young family of 6 has successfully emerged from Inner West Council’s DA process. There’s a long way to go but we’re so excited about next steps and refining the scheme for construction.
Our clients drivers are family, landscape, sustainability and community. Council’s focus was on heritage, streetscape and trees.
The existing driveway and garage have been imagined as a studio at the end of a wild, native meadow. Within a weathered masonry skin additions sit back from the restored bungalow - separated by a private court - and step down the site beneath a skillion roof. The existing basement is internalised, new dining and living spaces cut into the landscape to make the most of garden relationships. Additions pull back to the southern boundary maximising winter sunlight and creating a series of distinct indoor and outdoor rooms that culminate in a ‘natural pool’ - no chemicals, no salt!
Prioritising landscape is not an attempt to disguise architecture or make it disappear. Rather, we hope its deployment is subtle and appropriate. Elemental forms and raw materials contrast with warm, refined interiors, each room calibrated to orient and attune the occupant and heighten relationships of counterpoint; rough and smooth, hard and soft, raw and refined, new and old, intimate and monumental, building and garden. We hope that the house is as much a terrain or landscape metaphor as it is a building.
A 15kW solar array provides the energy needs for a fully-electric home. Heating and cooling is via in-slab hydronic pipes supported by a host of passive design principles. The natural pool along with the other landscape strategies will promote biodiversity attracting bees, birds, frogs and other wildlife.
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A House in a Garden in Marrickville, on the land of the Cadigal people.
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Project Team: Eoghan Lewis, William Stever
Landscape Architect:
Structural Engineer:
Hydraulics & Civil: .hydraulic
Render: .barcelona
