Birchgrove House

by PASSER Architects

From the Architect

Our clients approached us to reinvigorate life and light into their existing workers’ cottage on a heavily constrained site in the inner Sydney suburb of Birchgrove. Our brief was to modernise the interiors, maximise light, storage & flexibility in every way possible, and add extra space through a new second bedroom & bathroom to accommodate future family members.

The design rearranges the ground floor to reconnect the kitchen with the living room and small rear courtyard into a more coherent and modern open plan living space. The kitchen and laundry are designed as a compact unit with integrated appliances and pocket doors for a clean sophisticated look. Day-to-day the owners can open the pocket doors to use the laundry and appliance cabinet, then neatly conceal all life’s unavoidable clutter when visitors come over.

The materials palette of Victorian Ash timber veneer cabinetry, Carrara marble kitchen benches, terrazzo bathroom tiles, and plenty of white, creates texture and warmth within the interior spaces, in a functional yet contemporary aesthetic against the heritage character of the existing cottage. The Carrara island is a feature within the kitchen & living space, designed as a monolithic object in the room, it’s grey veining sitting in beautiful contrast against the timber cabinetry behind.

At the front of the house exists a small study space, designed as a flexible space that can act as an additional bedroom for guests if required. We relocated the entry to this room and opened it up with oversized cavity sliding doors to connect to the entry hall and create a sense of openness between the two spaces. Throughout the life of the house, many of the original heritage features had been removed, we reinstated heritage details in this room along with a complementary storage and display cabinet surrounding the existing fireplace.

Attached to their neighbours on three sides, the existing house was internalised, dark and with limited access to natural daylight. Light played an enormous part in the design process and thinking up new ways to draw light into the ground floor spaces that were previously lacking any natural light. We created a two storey lightwell void on the northern edge of the house, with a series of skylights to capture light from the roof to filter down into the interior spaces.

The white steel & timber stair is designed to sit lightly within the space, hanging from the ceiling almost as if it is hovering above the floor, to create a sense of lightness & transparency within the light well volume and living room. We maximised the openness of the stair to allow as much daylight as possible to pass through deep into the ground floor. It is beautiful to sit in the living room and watch the light move around the space throughout the day, the soft warm light shifts at varying angles filtering through the hanging stair creating a tranquil ambience, AND a bonus, the light makes it’s way all the way to the front door which was completely unexpected. What was a dark rabbit warren of a front hallway and ground floor, is now a clean, organised, light-filled space, with the light welcoming you into the house when you arrive!

Privacy within the confines of the inner city site was integral to the design of the first-floor extension. We saw this as an opportunity to rethink the traditional privacy screen, while still maximising natural daylight within the house. We looked to the local Heritage Conservation area for inspiration, and reinterpreted the traditional timber lattice as a modern facade cladding and screen, with openable sections to allow control of light and air internally. The screen allows a soft dappled light to filter into the new first-floor bedroom and down through the stairs further enhancing the quality of natural light within the house.

The house was such a joy to design and see built, with a wonderful team and clients all working in absolute togetherness to overcome the challenges of the build, the stair & privacy screens being the most difficult, but most rewarding for the build! Not long into construction, we learned the clients were expecting their first baby on the day the build was due to finish! To say the builder was under pressure to get the job done would be an understatement! ….he nailed it and finished on time!