Angular Charm

As you walk down the street, Nikki Maloney’s house is easy to identify. The pastel-painted weatherboards of her original cottage form the fence of her new home where she now lives with partner Margee Brown. It is a house designed by architect Drew Heath to redress what was lacking in the original cottage, but retain its charm and sense of sanctuary, as well as much of its actual material fabric.

Maloney had bought the 1890s cottage, just a few doors back from busy Marrickville Road, in Sydney’s innerwest, twenty years earlier, so says she was more than fond of her long-time home and its jungle-like garden. When she met Heath, he quickly understood this and came up with ideas of how to retain a sense of the old but in a new home that would let in much more light and air and make fuller use of the unusual site.

“I’d always liked the in-out feeling of the old house and thought we might be able to [recreate it],” Maloney says. “Drew talked about following the shape of the triangular block and making a courtyard in the centre. I wanted to maintain a low footprint too … I never wanted a big house.”

The site was an unusual clipped triangle shape, with a long street frontage to the west, so potentially a lot of exposure to passers-by. Heath drew a freehand plan for Maloney, and this and his later cardboard model for the house remained essentially unchanged.

The house has two wings that run parallel with the two long boundaries, enclosing a courtyard. On the ground floor, these wings are living areas, with sliding glass doors onto a shared outdoor space, so stretching the dimensions of the internal rooms and providing an extra outdoor living area.

Because the block had one long street frontage and was just a few houses back from the local shopping strip, Heath says it was a priority to secure separation and privacy from the street. “We set up a couple of layers of protection,” he explains. “One is the solid masonry perimeter fence, a solid masonry privacy wall, then double brick in a C-shape and everything on the inside is glass and operable, so you can play in the middle.”

Given the protection of the outer walls, the interior of the house has a tranquil atmosphere. You are aware of neighbours, but the house is focussed on its own private courtyard and deep grassy garden, which is planted at the edges with grevillea and banksia. These will grow to form a natural privacy screen and food source for local birds, says Maloney.

Throughout the interior, Heath has incorporated inventive connections between internal rooms and outside views. For example, in the wing that houses the kitchen and dining space, a high window frames the spire of the nearby St Clement’s Church.

“We’re in between a number of churches – I can also look to the Catholic Church spire and cross on the other side, as well as the Greek Orthodox,” Maloney says. “It is the stuff I love about Marrickville, so it’s good still to be able to see it.”

A playful opening is set up between the kitchen and the pantry behind it too. “I like making holes in walls,” Heath muses. “And I like it because we can see all the way from here into the back garden,” the owner adds.

The ground floor bathroom is another refreshingly unconventional room. More like a bathhouse than a purely functional room, it has a bathtub overlooking a side courtyard garden and a void which lets in a cool flood of southern light. “I often say to people, ‘Come and look how bright this bathroom is on the south side of the house’,” Heath says.

He also talks about how he has tried to push and pull the volumes of upstairs and downstairs, for example, this void, which links the two floors, actually bounces light into the upstairs bathroom, which has a similarly sensuous effect of gentle light and pared-back form.

The staircase, sited in the middle of the house, provides the physical access between the two floors, and doubles as a vent, setting up a subtle flow of air upwards through the core of the home.

“There will be a pond downstairs, or a garden [as there is now], so the staircase is the fundamental natural air conditioning,” Heath says. “It is an open stair with operable windows at the top, so it works well – you can feel the air circulating.”

Another key environmental aspect of the house is the connection between inside and out. Both the lower living rooms and the two bedrooms, which sit directly above them, open to green. The bedrooms both look out to treetops and have roof gardens; plantings will grow and drape down over the lower building.

“The breezes are amazing up here,” Maloney says, standing in her favourite, more cave-like of the two bedrooms. “In the old cottage, there were no northern windows and no breeze, so it was hot in summer and freezing in winter. I came home a few weeks ago on a cold day. I walked through the door and it was warm. It is its own little eco system in here.”

The way materials were used in the house also kept Maloney’s environmental footprint modest. In construction – unusually Heath acts as both architect and builder – most of the materials from the original home were recycled. “Basically as we demolished everything on site, we stockpiled it in the backyard; old bits of wood this side, weatherboards with paint here,” Heath recalls. “We built the bones of the house out of recycled bricks and then we’d go out into the backyard and look for stuff.”

Maloney says she loves this reuse of materials because it recalls the old cottage. Her new home does indeed retain much of the original, as she had hoped it would. It has similar nooks and crannies too, she says, and it’s popular with native birds, as was her old cottage garden. She tells how recently a pair of native doves came to teach their baby to fly in her new garden. As if on cue, a native dove appears. Maloney is clearly delighted. Her new home, like her old, is a sanctuary.