Monday July 14 2008

A playful sense of surprise characterises the reinvention of this historic home in Melbourne’s bayside suburbs. A first-floor deck that sits among the area’s jumble of Victorian-era chimneys and TV aerials, for example, calls to mind rooftop-dancing sweeps in Mary Poppins. It springs from the creative vision of Michael Leeton and Kate Pointon, husband-and-wife architects and owners who have designed an award-winning two-storey extension to their weatherboard workers’ cottage. And, it seems, had great fun in the process.

Facing up to the spatial needs of their growing family, the couple – who live here with their children, Scarlett, two, and Oscar, seven months – decided to scale up their existing home, on the corner of a bluestone-cobbled lane rather than relocate to the suburbs. “We fell in love with the area when we moved in about five years ago,” says Michael. “We’d always planned to renovate and realised we had to make the most of the site.”

The first challenge was the small block – just 7x19m. Furthermore, building restrictions stipulated that the heritage-listed cottage had to be left intact. Such constraints provided a framework for experimentation – a challenge embraced by the couple, whose design practice specialises in residential architecture.

Their aim was to flood the once-dark house with lots of natural light while incorporating bold architectural statements.

“We wanted to create generous spaces, but without it costing a fortune, maximising the house size without compromising the connection to the outside,” says Michael.
The solution was, in effect, to reorientate the site, rotating the layout to shift the entrance to the side. “The laneway gave us an opportunity to rethink the site,” explains Kate. “This gave us a 19-metre-wide frontage, instead of the usual narrow block subdivision.”

The new entrance makes full use of its wider canvas. The front door is flanked by a playfully curved exterior wall with an exposed glass stairwell inspired by the work of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto. On the other side, copper cladding cradles the top floor. Recycled from the refurbished State Library of Victoria, the copper has been turned back to front, exposing warm brown tones. The new entrance opens directly onto an internal cobbled courtyard, which serves both as a lightwell and as the transition point from the old cottage to the start of the double-storey extension.

The old lean-tos, including the original kitchen, a bathroom and laundry, were demolished. Three front rooms in the old cottage were retained and are now used as a bedroom, study and formal living room. The new extension, built at the rear of the cottage, accommodates a living/kitchen/dining area downstairs, leading to two courtyards via sliding glass doors; on the upper level are two bedrooms and a bathroom.

The open, apartment-style layout downstairs is a sampler of effective tricks for boosting the perception of space. The strip window above the kitchen, which peers out over the laneway, captures morning sun and borrows views from neighbouring gardens. On the opposite wall, a raised travertine ledge with a gas fire in the centre floats along the wall. It holds concealed lighting that gently bathes the western wall with a soft glow by night. “These elements were designed to give the area a simple but generous sense of scale,” says Michael.

Bedrooms are accessed via the funky glazed stairwell to the right of the front door, which looks out over the laneway.

“The stair window acts like a lantern,” explain the architects. “It exposes and animates the interior of the building.”

Upstairs, the family’s private spaces are cleverly designed to maximise their perspective and engage with the outside. One of the children’s bedrooms has a raised, built-in bed that sits over the old cottage’s roofspace and overlooks the internal courtyard. The main bedroom and bathroom have access to a private sundeck, with yet another twist – an artifical lawn. With views over the chimneys, back to the city and towards the bay, says Michael, “it feels like you’re in a treehouse up here”.