A nostalgic angle: Acute House

Wrapped in cladding salvaged from the small Victorian cottage that was originally on the site, this compact but generous home by OOF! Architecture sits within a modest envelope and presents a cordial face to the street.

Retrophilia runs rife in Australia’s inner-city suburbs. Perhaps it’s nostalgia for the fast-disappearing rundown cottages amid the gentrification and urban renewal, or maybe it’s just the inherent charm of the warped weatherboards and flaking paling fences, but these little suburban ruins often tug at the heartstrings of their owners and neighbours alike.

When Fooi-Ling Khoo of OOF! Architecture was presented with one such ruin – a falling-down Victorian cottage in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Albert Park – she and her clients agreed they wanted to keep it and rework it into a new house.

The astonishingly small, forty-eight-square-metre triangular site, wedged between a wide suburban street to the south and a narrow alleyway to the north, originally held a two-storey weatherboard cottage with a lean-to, a small yard and an outside toilet in the pointy corner. “Because we all loved the textures and the crazy decrepitude of the house, we decided to keep as much of it as we could,” Fooi-Ling says.

The staircase that runs through the house brings in light and helps to increase the sense of spaciousness.

The staircase that runs through the house brings in light and helps to increase the sense of spaciousness.

Image: Nic Granleese

But unfortunately, the original structures were unsalvageable. In fact, the outside toilet was “leaning so far over the footpath it was classified as a public hazard,” Fooi-Ling says. So in preserving the old house, all the cladding was carefully removed, a new house was built in its place and the original cladding was then reinstated on the skin of the new as a pasted graphic. Rather than the old transitioning into the new, as is the design of many houses with a heritage requirement, this house is a case of the old literally embracing the new.

“In some ways [we’ve done] the reverse of what normally happens with heritage projects,” Fooi-Ling says. “Typically … you keep the frame underneath, remove the cladding and put new cladding on, [in which case] the house doesn’t look anything like it did before, because everything you can actually see has been replaced.

“Given the original house was structurally so far gone and that we wanted to retain as much of the original fabric as possible, what we did was keep all the cladding, and everything underneath has been replaced.”

Incredibly, the new house – on the interface between the street and laneway – packs about 140 square metres of liveable space onto the site. It is by no means palatial, but it affords the owners, a couple with a young child and a dog, a compact but generous home within a modest envelope that presents a cordial face to the street.

The angles of the roof line create a loft-like bedroom that is aligned to be on axis with the Eureka Tower.

The angles of the roof line create a loft-like bedroom that is aligned to be on axis with the Eureka Tower.

Image: Nic Granleese

Derivative of the old, the new home has the same gabled form, but it is oriented perpendicular to the original and extruded along the length of the street, “like a loaf,” as Fooi-Ling describes, “and sliced off by the laneway.”

This has resulted in a form that, curiously, seems to present a bigger frontage to the narrow laneway than it does to the much wider street. But in context, the form actually responds to the scale of its neighbour, a three-storey apartment block that lines the laneway to the north. Meanwhile, the southern side is more modestly scaled, in deference to the classic single-storey Victorian homes that line the opposite side of the wide street.

Internally, the house is a demonstration of efficient planning through the use of vertical circulation and half levels. On the entry level, two rooms – the office and a kid’s bedroom – are concealed behind a joinery wall fixed with coat hooks. The bathroom is in the half-basement and directly above (half a level up from the entry) is a powder room, which coincidentally is in the same location as the former outside toilet. “It’s like a dedication to the old loo,” Fooi-Ling says. “The client told me that this is his favourite room, because when you sit in here, you can see the whole house. It’s a bit like the control station. You can see who’s in the kitchen, who’s coming through the door, what the kids are doing.”

Parapet walls are used as benches, where you can sit and lean against the mesh barrier like a hammock.

Parapet walls are used as benches, where you can sit and lean against the mesh barrier like a hammock.

Image: Nic Granleese

Half a level up again is the living-kitchen-dining area. Because of the limited space, every corner has been colonized for a useful purpose. “Space mining” is a term the architect uses when describing her approach to designing the house. Even the dog has his own shelf, “because all the corridor areas are required all the time, [so] there’s no corner to put a dog bowl.”

On the balcony, at the narrow ship’s-bow corner of the building, the parapet walls of the level below are used as benches where the occupants can sit and lean against the mesh barrier like a hammock. At the top-most level is the main bedroom and ensuite, where the shower and the window in the bedroom are cleverly aligned to be on axis with the Eureka Tower.

“In order to maximize the potential of the site in terms of living space, we basically got rid of all corridors and most doors,” Fooi-Ling explains. The staircase that runs through the house also brings in light, “so no matter where you are, there’s always light coming up and down that space. No matter where you are, you can always look to a bigger space,” giving the illusion of having more space than there is.

The Acute House received an award in the Architectural Design category at the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Design Awards and was the winner of the Residential – Alterations category at the 2016 Architeam Awards.

Products and materials

Roofing
Metal Cladding Systems aluminium standing seam, installed by Advanced Metal Cladding; Knauf insulation.
External walls
Metal Cladding Systems aluminium standing seam.
Internal walls
Plywood with clear satin finish.
Windows
Pickering Joinery double-hung timber windows; Aneeta sashless double-hung windows; Breezway Altair Louvre Windows; Velux skylights.
Doors
Pickering Joinery glazed timber doors; timber doors and perforated metal screens by Mitty and Price Builders; Bellevue Imports door pulls and levers.
Flooring
Solutions polished concrete; polished timber floorboards by Mitty and Price Builders; Tretford goat hair carpet.
Lighting
Lighting from LZF Lamps, Hive, ISM Objects, Euroluce, Ambience, Spicon, Hotbeam and Dunlin.
Kitchen
Custom formply joinery; H ä fele and Blum joinery fittings; Smeg cooktop and oven; Qasair tubular rangehood; Fisher and Paykel fridge and dishdrawer; Reece kitchen mixer; custom stainless steel sink.
Bathroom
Sanitary fittings from Mary Noall; Hydrotherm heated towel rail; vintage basement sink; Parisi powder room basin; Astra Walker tapware and accessories; tiles from Academy Tiles.
Heating and cooling
Marshall’s Heating and Air Conditioning; Morsø wood fireplace; Big Ass Fans ceiling fans.
Other
Stair balustrade by Jakob Webnet installed by Tensile Deign and Construct.

Credits

Project
Acute House
Architect
OOF! Architecture
Melbourne, Vic, Australia
Project Team
Fooi-Ling Khoo, David Brand
Consultants
Builder Mitty and Price Builders
Building surveyor Anthony Middling and Associates
Electrician Warner Electrical
Engineer Mark Hodkinson Consulting Structural Engineers
Interiors OOF! Architecture, JPILD
Joiner TT Cabinets + Design
Lighting JPILD
Metalwork Redon Forge
Site Details
Location Melbourne,  Vic,  Australia
Site type Suburban
Project Details
Status Built
Completion date 2016
Category Residential
Type Alts and adds, New houses

Source

Project

Published online: 15 Dec 2016
Words: Linda Cheng
Images: Nic Granleese

Issue

Houses, October 2016

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