Opportunity Knocks

Homeowners Rose and Nick engaged Curious Practice to design a new door for their Newcastle home, wanting to open up the house and promote an indoor-outdoor connection. However, a newish concrete slab was observed as starting to fall away. The area is renowned for underground mine workings, but this property had not been mapped. The property was investigated and the existing house had to be demolished to enable remediation works to the site.

Rose and Nick, with their three young children, loved the leafy neighbourhood and decided to rebuild, providing the opportunity to create a small-footprint house that maximises indoor-outdoor connections and landscaped areas. The reduced size of the house also allowed for better use of the budget, and for meeting the deadline for completion. It had to be constructed within a short timeframe, resulting in six months for design, documentation and approval, and six months for the build. Consequently, Curious Practice developed and fine-tuned some of the details on-site.

The family loves the garden and being outdoors. With a 55-square-metre footprint, their four-bedroom house occupies only 15 per cent of their typical suburban property, allowing for lots of landscaping and play areas for the kids. Living spaces are on the ground level, and bedrooms upstairs so the family can all be connected.

Curious Practice designed the house to relate to its context: a unique five-way intersection of mixed residential and commercial buildings. A chain-link fence alongside this corner maintains a sense of transparency for the family to engage with the street.

It also opens to the entrance of the house, which has been carefully sequenced through a series of outdoor and indoor spaces, thresholds and volumes. A covered walkway has a high ceiling that lowers above the front door to create a feeling of compression, before the ceiling lifts and floor steps down to create a greater sense of space in the living room. This sunken space has a garden-level bench seat in front of a large window, where the homeowners can sit and chat with passersby. “It’s a nice playful moment with the really active street,” says Greg Lee, director of Curious Practice.

The window also allows for cross ventilation and sunlight, with large deciduous street trees buffering the western sun. In summer, dappled shadows from the trees’ leaves are cast across the concrete floor. In winter, the trees allow sunlight to filter deep inside the room and heat the slab for thermal mass.

The living, dining and kitchen also open to the back of the house, where a double-height roof shades the outdoor spaces and provides sun control in summer and winter. This roof, with exposed rafters, extends over the upstairs bedrooms, with operable high-level windows at the top of the doors allowing greater air movement through the house. This maintains privacy and allows the ceiling to be viewed as a singular, uninterrupted plane. It also creates a sense of togetherness for the family when upstairs, and strengthens the connection between the house and the garden, landscape and trees beyond. Skylights bring sun into the bathrooms along the street-side of the house, so as not to compromise their privacy.

The material palette is atypical for a suburban house, but proved robust and cost-effective, and allowed Curious Practice to play with the detailing along the way. “We used different textures to affect light differently and get interest in the building,” Greg says. The light grey exterior, with fibre cement sheeting and galvanised flat sheets, will recede amid the landscaped yard.

Inside, the ground floor interior is concrete to a datum line that runs around the living room, with birch ply joinery and wall linings above. “We like the idea that everything inserted is furniture, so there is no distinction between the wall and joinery. We replicated this upstairs where the ply runs from bedroom to bedroom and extends up to the rafters,” Greg describes. Curious Practice also custom-designed the awnings, kitchen shelves, bath shelves and handrails, collaborating with the fabricators and builder to develop the details on-site.

They also worked closely with the builder and trades to minimise waste, labour and time. The structure and finishes are based on standard material sizes. For example, the width of the fibre cement sheets determined the wall lengths and the distance between the timber purlins on the upstairs ceiling.

Galvanised sheets line the interior of the carport at the front of the house. It opens to the kitchen so there is a view from the front yard to backyard. It’s a space for Rose and Nick’s children to frolic, as is most of the site. With strong indoor-outdoor connections, the small-footprint house and expansive garden provide plenty of room for play, with different landscaped areas, steps and seats to spark activities and imagination.