Park Life

Our Park Life project sits on the land of the Wurundjeri people, who have been the traditional custodians of this area for generations.

Our clients bought a lovely Edwardian house in Fitzroy North, right on the edge of a park. It was in OK shape, but it needed a lot of work to get it back to its former glory, and the layout ignored its best asset. The house split the garden into two awkward pieces, and the boundary to the park gave nothing back but an outdoor corridor.

Their brief was less a list of rooms than a feeling: a centre to the house where you feel cocooned, an open, easy connection to the garden, and above all, privacy and sanctuary. We kept the original house at the front, with the front room turned into a library with a window seat. Behind it, a single-storey wing holds the kids’ rooms, with the kitchen as the hinge between old and new. A garden wall wraps the new wing, and a small light court brings sun and air into the middle of the plan. The two leftover outdoor spaces became one private garden in the middle of the site. At the back, a sunken studio sits low to the park, so it gets controlled light and privacy from the paths outside.

The materials sit deliberately between slick and minimal on one side and crafted and handmade on the other, a bridge that reflects the two people who live there. The result is a house where it’s hard to tell old from new. Both clients say it feels as though it was always there, rather than an old house with a new extension.

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