Light + Shade

Northcote wine merchant, Nick Stamford, admits he and his partner Georgina never envisaged replacing their dark, double-fronted Victorian house with a boldly transparent home that reads from the street like three glazed rectangular boxes, loosely staggered and stacked to offer – when the family is in the mood – views through the house to a generous garden and a raised lap pool at the rear. “We wanted an architect with more interesting ideas to throw at us than what was in our heads, and Andrew’s got some ideas that push the boundaries in a lot of ways,” Nick says. “We were very open to all of these – said no to a bunch of them and yes to another bunch of them as well.”

The Stamfords first approached Maynard back in 2009 after buying a house on a 520-square-metre block just three doors down from their previous home. Maynard’s unexpected solution was partly inspired by statistics released at the time, showing Australian houses were the largest in the world. Clients and architect were equally keen to buck the trend.

“We wanted a small footprint because we really cherish the backyard,” Nick recalls. The brief? Three modest bedrooms, a fourth for occasional use, a central kitchen for keen cooks that’s strongly connected to living spaces inside and out, a backyard long enough for a decent cricket pitch, and an above-ground lap pool to help Nick Stamford manage his dodgy back.

Maynard presented two options: one “very playful and challenging”, and a pared-back solution that the clients jumped at. “That’s pretty typical for my processes,” Maynard says. “I need to draw and start going somewhere, and usually do a dozen terrible things and go down these rabbit holes [first].”

As well as stats Maynard was reacting against labelling as a “sustainable architect”. “Studying in Tassie it [sustainability] is a core part of architecture,” he says, “and if you’re not producing sustainable design then you’re not doing your job properly.” Hence his determination to create “a really good, passively performing home that just did not aestheticise sustainability at all.”

There’s not a mud brick in sight on the home the Stamfords eventually started building in early 2014 (after postponing construction to pursue an unexpected business opportunity). It’s a boldly revealing abode, with transparent and block-out floor-mounted blinds that roll up, not down, giving inhabitants nuanced control over sitelines into and outside of the house.

Gorgeously sculptural handcrafted timber-clad joinery running along the east and west walls unites the house with its courtyards and gardens. Hiding not only storage for wine, food, clothes, garden equipment and pool toys but whole rooms including the galley laundry, ensuites upstairs and down, and a sizeable study that’s also used as a guest bedroom. Maynard and Stamford still marvel over the “unrelenting” craftsmanship of a feature that required two months’ full-time labour.

With so much here concealed but openable on demand, and a central staircase of perforated sheet metal offering uninterrupted sitelines throughout, there’s a feeling of expansiveness despite a scale that’s around half that of neighbouring properties.

Maynard’s design is essentially a stack of long rectangular forms: two at ground level linked by a central indoor/outdoor hallway (kitchen, dining and sitting spaces and an internal courtyard to the east; living, laundry, bathroom/ensuite and study/guestroom spaces to the west), with a third up top for the bedrooms and bathroom.

With budget in mind the exterior side walls are clad in low-cost Colorbond. Each form opens at front and rear with dramatic 4.5 to 5-metre wide double-glazed windows. They vary in length from 15.5 to 20.4 metres, are staggered to avoid immense bulk, and are precisely calibrated to provide flexible spaces that can be used and screened in multiple ways. “We’ve done the hard yards on five-anda- half-metre blocks in Fitzroy,” Maynard says. “So we know how to squeeze the most out of spaces, and we know how much 100 mm is worth.”

The glamourous house nestles snugly into stylish gardens at the front and rear designed by Ben Scott. Staggered concrete sleepers are cleverly used to echo the home’s distinctive silhouette.

For Stamford the adjustable transparency of the house is its central appeal. “I love the openness of it, I really, really do,” he says. “Yes, it’s on display, but you realise when you look at other houses … [that] they’re really quite forbidding from the front. We didn’t want it to feel like that at all.”

Who knew motorised upward blinds could be the key to an architectural project? “We always hate condemning people to binaries: you either have it open or closed,” Maynard says. “We were never going to propose something like this unless we had the ability for you to adjust it depending on your mood. It’s about giving people choice.”