When clients come to an architect with a well-loved house and garden, the architect’s role is to work a little bit like a tailor: splicing their work into what is already there, carefully unpicking and amending without losing the original qualities. Alena and Dave are art collectors and avid gardeners, they love to cook and, importantly, they love their brick stucco house, located just north of Hobart. When they engaged Bence Mulcahy, they specified the usual set of requirements – new kitchen, dining, lounge, main bedroom – but without some of the standard requests for “large,” “open plan” or “lots of windows.” The backyard extension that Bence Mulcahy has designed is skilfully crafted around the personalities, passions and needs of this family, and the constraints of their tight suburban site. The result feels bespoke to this context, formed equally of people and place.
New Town is defined by undulating, tightly packed suburban development, a good proportion of which was constructed prior to 1950. Alena and Dave’s house was built in the 1920s, with stucco finish and exposed timber detailing. As is often the case with houses like this, its service spaces were squeezed at the rear, forming a barrier rather than an entry to a west-facing garden. Tucked into the side of a long ridge and looking to kunanyi/Mount Wellington, the home also suffered from overlook, as houses either side had been built out and up for the view.
Through many iterations, a plan emerged that created a direct line of movement and sight between the existing home and the new, garden-focused spaces, pulling the presence of the garden into the home’s point of arrival. The narrow kitchen and service spaces across the rear of the home have been removed and the new work – added along the eastern side of the site – opens up to the garden along its northern and western edges. The extension steps down in floor level where it leaves the original house, and then steps back up towards the back fence. The drop in level increases privacy in the new work, while also aligning the spaces directly with the sloping garden. Burying the work slightly creates a strong sense of being “in” the garden, with framed views directly through garden foliage.
Wanting to avoid “a box on the back,” Bence Mulcahy worked to fit all of the new work under the existing roofline. The extension reads like an extrusion of the original home that has been sliced into, allowing in light and connections to the garden. A tightly packed series of spaces exists within this extrusion: kitchen and dining in the centre, laundry and storage spaces tucked behind the kitchen, and a cosy main bedroom suite above the kitchen that captures a view back to the mountain. A lounge, which sits a few steps above the kitchen level, is small in plan but remains expansive through its ceiling height and glazed connection to the rear section of the garden. Across the new, carved face of the extension is a second skin of white grid mesh, which will support a full, “furry” green wall into the future as its vines take hold.
The material palette of the home is robust yet refined. The clients describe themselves as people who “live hard,” requesting kickable surfaces, tables you could stand (or possibly dance) on and a home that would take everything they threw at it. The shell of the build is double brick, honed on the inside and left rough on the outside. The kitchen has a polished concrete floor (with a subtle tint of green), benches in a deep green stone, and joinery in a combination of brickwork, solid hardwood and matt laminates. A small bathroom on the original level of the house is remade in the new palette, skylit from above and lined with square, matt, green tiles. The bedroom suite upstairs is deliberately different. A series of dusty and deep, dark pinks make up the wall, tile and laminate colours that define the stair climb, bed space and bathroom.
While exploring this project, it is hard not to be distracted by the clients’ collection of art, which is contemporary, diverse and joyful. Their garden is a parallel space, tightly packed with texture and colour. As art and garden lovers do, they have grown used to rearranging their life to make space for works or plants to sing, and to using every available surface. The architects have worked in concert with them on this task, creating new wall spaces, niches, overhangs and levels that allow Alena and Dave to place and reposition their beloved collections. This collaborative strategy has worked at all scales, with Bence Mulcahy carefully rearranging, stretching and amplifying the existing qualities of the home and the shaping of its landscape, in order to tailor a distinctive place for the enjoyment of a garden, an art collection and a young family.