Location: Woolooware, Sydney, Australia
Year: 2018
AWARDS
2018 Houses Awards – Shortlisted Finalist
2018 Australian Timber Design Awards – Shortlisted Finalist
Architects: Christopher Polly Architect
Landscape: Fig Landscapes
Photography: Brett Boardman Photography
A crafted volume is carefully connected to the retained and refashioned rear of an original 1960’s yellow brick envelope to enact clear planning, cost and environmental values in an articulated binary composition – a cellular and private front, with an open and public rear that expands to its setting.
The retained bungalow allows the cultural value of its suburban type to be preserved within its locality, while also supporting environmental and budget outcomes. Its interior carefully configures a program of bedrooms and utility spaces, with vaulted skylights carved within the original roof expanding several spaces to light and sky. A sharply folding intermediary form spatially unlocks a compressed front hall while allowing the location of interstitial courtyards for light, ventilation and multiple aspects at the centre of the plan – in turn promoting an interplay of private and public rooms across front and rear zones.
The two-storey pavilion provides a volumetrically expansive double-height living area, and serves as a generously proportioned ‘garden room’ with large apertures capturing sky and landscape views. Its stair element extends the established circulation condition from the original front entry, while also marking a loose threshold for the arrangement of two smaller rooms at one end of its volume. It achieves improved privacy from neighbours while concurrently providing desired transparency for unfettered spatial relationships within its volume and across its two parts for strengthened connections to its place.
It employs an approach to enable a strong focus of the memory and character of the existing front fabric within the new rear spaces, while an interior bi-chromatic strategy of considered honey and grey material tones strongly reference the two distinct exterior materials. A northern blade screen and a pinched rear profile enable greater solar access onto the thermal mass of a reverse concrete-veneer wall and ground floor slab, with its cantilevered terrace edge and sculpted step element doubling as seats for direct enjoyment of the garden.
Christopher Polly Architect
All images courtesy of Christopher Polly Architect |© Brett Boardman Photography
Christopher Polly Architect
Christopher Polly Architect is an award winning design and ideas-focused architecture practice established by Christopher Polly in Sydney in late 2005. In the same year the practice was selected by the Australian Institute of Architects for the ‘Emerging Young Architects’ Houses Tour and it has been widely published, both locally and internationally.
The practice distils a holistic detail design and process-led approach in the delivery of highly creative and pragmatic architectural solutions that resonate simplicity, conceptual rigour and material invention. A strong emphasis is placed on a critical synthesis of the opportunities and constraints of each site, context and client brief as a catalyst for uniquely appropriate design outcomes in response to place, landscape and patterns of use.
Christopher Polly engages with clients who share in the reward of accomplishing bold visions to enrich their daily lives, who prioritise quality over quantity, and who place value in achieving inventive and well crafted spaces that are meticulously detailed and finished. more
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Christopher Polly Architect
