Houses Revisited: Stratford Street house

Very like Parnell’s charming however slim streets, the rooms in a lot of this suburb’s unique villas will be tough areas for the trendy household to navigate. Earlier than renovation, this Nineties’ villa consisted of the usual 4 small rooms extending from a central hallway, a lean-to containing the toilet and kitchen, and an advert hoc assortment of additives to the rear. 

A pair of rising boys and their toys instigated the owners to fee Philip Graham of Salmond Reed Architects to renovate and lengthen the again of the constructing with a brand new open-plan kitchen and residing space. A brand new rest room was added, in addition to an en suite for the grasp bed room.

“The villa had all the trimmings of a constructing that faces the road however it didn’t make a lot use of the again,” says Graham. “Now the constructing successfully has two fronts to it and this knowledgeable the architectural response as properly, because it was actually vital to make a distinction between the place the outdated constructing stopped and the brand new began.”

The pavilion gable of the extension echoes the roofline of the unique home and in addition brings about pictures of the customary form and type of a wharenui. Board and batten, as a conventional cladding system, is used for the transitional house between the unique constructing and the brand new, pavilion-style extension. The extension is clad in cedar weatherboards, chosen to echo the rusticated weatherboards on the entrance façade.

“Every little thing is textured in villas,” explains Graham, “and I wished to hold that by way of to the inside, as properly, with the panelled ceiling within the pavilion. The flooring are recycled kauri boards of their pure, golden state and these proceed on from these within the hallway. These components guarantee there’s a clear distinction between the outdated and new — however it’s not an excessive amount of of a stark distinction.”

The black-and-stainless-steel again wall of the kitchen is softened by the traditional herringbone-tiled splashback and by the island, which, with its marble prime and oak boards, lends a delicate transition into the residing house. 

“The raise in ceiling top from the kitchen to the pavilion additionally helps to outline the residing house; that is vital in an open-plan space,” says Graham.

The lounge opens by way of giant sliding doorways to the deck, which wraps round two sides of the extension and options steps that double as bleacher seating, located to face the town view. Whereas the home takes up a lot of the web site, there may be nonetheless room for a bit of garden. That is lined with the terracotta bricks from the home’s unique chimney, which had been discovered piled up beneath the home throughout web site works.

A quirk of the home is the attic house, which was initially designed as storage however has wound up getting used as a plywood-lined den for the owners’ sons: a sort of inside tree hut. It’s accessed by way of a ladder that drops down from a trapdoor within the hallway ceiling and options an operable skylight. 

Certainly, fairly just a few surprises lurk behind the entrance door of this seemingly unassuming villa: proof that it’s doable for a home to develop together with a household.

MATERIAL SELECTOR

Philip Graham discusses the supplies chosen for the Stratford Road Home.

How did you combine the totally different materials palettes of the brand new extension and the outdated villa?

The supplies of the extension are of the same design profile to that of the prevailing home (rusticated weatherboards, plus board-and-batten cladding). Nevertheless, they’re totally different in scale and materials end.

It is a deliberate architectural response to permit the unique cottage/villa to be legible (and, subsequently, not misplaced) in opposition to the brand new pavilion extension. The board-and-batten ‘hyperlink’ between the prevailing constructing and the pavilion is stained black as a ‘unfavourable element’ or separation between the 2 buildings.

Regardless of the constraints of the positioning, you’ve used giant expanses of glazing within the home windows and doorways to border the views — how did you set this up and are they specified to suit precisely?

The glazing was got down to make the most of the town views to the west and the northerly solar facet. The beneficiant glazing was designed so as to add a way of house to a reasonably compact flooring plan and as a distinction to the cottage, which has pretty low ranges of mild.

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Notice: These are tales from our archives and, because the time of writing, some particulars could have modified together with names, personnel of particular corporations, registration standing, and so on.