Garden House

Seaforth, NSW

 

A legible step away from “house”, it proposes that a suburban block can be a landscape into which rooms are placed. An earlier studio was designed for the same clients at the same address, located in the rear garden of an existing house, that was deliberately designed for future disassembly with precise timber construction.

 

The current brief included the remodelling of the original house and the connection of all buildings and edges to adjacent gardens. Functional pavilions have been placed into interconnecting garden areas. The edges of formal and informal are blurred. Formal dining is a pavilion in the garden, a frangipani courtyard becomes the wall between informal living and dining.

 

There is a blur beyond the inside/outside – it investigates how we live and the search for a more impermanent occupation of this country. The old building lifts an eyelid to the north, winter warmth is allowed to penetrate, walls open wholly onto gardens, gardens become walls for garden living, definitions only exist as sinks and stoves, the kitchen is deliberately functional, adjoining spaces expand the play of the room, occupants move easily between gardens and rooms, one might say from “room to room”.