Apex House

This renovation and addition of a semi-detached Edwardian house in bayside Melbourne makes full use of its narrow site to provide a light-filled contemporary home for a young family.

Our brief was to cre­ate a home for a cou­ple return­ing to Aus­tralia from Lon­don to start a fam­i­ly. Their first child was born dur­ing the design phase and the sec­ond arrived some time after. The fam­i­ly were com­fort­ably accom­mo­dat­ed with three bed­rooms and two liv­ing spaces. To achieve this, the front three rooms of the exist­ing house were retained, and the remain­der demol­ished to make way for a new archi­tec­tur­al form.

2018
Elwood, Woi­wu­rung Land

Site Area

220m²

Internal Area

176m²

External Area

70m²

Bedrooms

3

Bathrooms

2

Locat­ed at the begin­ning of a row of 11 iden­ti­cal pairs of hous­es, the orig­i­nal archi­tec­ture was in need of restora­tion and a return to it’s for­mer glory.

Push­ing the new addi­tion to the site bound­aries placed lim­its on the roof form, and the roof height was con­strained by a her­itage over­lay pre­clud­ing vis­i­bil­i­ty from the street. Our solu­tion was to use the roof form to cre­ate a sense of space in the upper lev­el, and to pro­vide max­i­mum access to nat­ur­al light.

The upper lev­el uses clever plan­ning to deliv­er the ameni­ty and spa­cious­ness of a much larg­er vol­ume. A hall­way dou­bles as a home office and, beyond this, the bed­room opens up to a sculp­tur­al ceil­ing ani­mat­ed by a sub­tle play of light and shad­ow. From here, a large walk-through robe leads to a bright en suite, fea­tur­ing a show­er with full sky­light above.

Credits

Pho­tog­ra­phy: Sharyn Cairns
Land­scape Design: Mud Stu­dio
Con­trac­tor: Prolifica

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