Secret Gardens

The revitalisation of workers’ cottages and Victorian terraces means you never know what’s behind the historic façade as they are opened up, extended, updated and modernised for contemporary living. House of Gardens in Newtown, Sydney, designed and built by award-winning Drew Heath Architects, may have a workers’ cottage façade, but the house itself is now a surprising series of volumes and voids that accommodate various gardens, courtyards and living spaces.

The original house was built in the late 19th century and over time had a rear extension tacked on, a side passage converted to kitchen and an outhouse incorporated into the home. Wanting to change the way they lived, the clients engaged Drew to unify the house, better utilise the footprint, create a new living space and bring in light and air – all while preserving the features they liked, such as the ceiling, floorboards and clerestory windows with views of the sky and jacaranda trees.

Fascinated by inwards-looking architecture, Drew interwove indoor and outdoor spaces to create a layer of complexity and a feeling of introspection. “Building architecture in the foreground, landscape in the middle ground and architecture again in the background means you control the whole picture, as you would painting a landscape,”

Drew explains. “One of my driving concepts is to make a house like a village and I often refer to the hillside villages of Italy and Spain, which have an open space in the middle, laneways running through and buildings overlooking those spaces and the landscape.”

From the entrance, the existing front room seems, visually, to dissolve into three glass-encased voids, only to emerge again as the new rear extension. These transparent voids host a lush and vibrant fern landscape to the left, a courtyard with climbers to the right and a passageway through the centre. The passage leads to the new living space and offers a sightline from the front door into the rear garden with native grasses and vegetable planters.

The house has five gardens in total with each providing a different landscape. A frangipani in the front of the house is “an ode to the classic Australian garden”, Drew says, and a roof garden, which can be seen from the mid-level study space, has colourful succulents that will cover the surface and cascade down into the courtyard. “Planting helps to take away brightness. Looking down on to green matter, rather than a roof, takes away the reflectivity of the surfaces,” adds Drew. The garden is embedded into a sunken form that protrudes from the kitchen and bathroom ceiling, its biomorphic curves cutting away for the shower-head and lighting.

A natural and minimal material palette throughout the housemeans the architecture becomes a backdrop to the gardens andcourtyards. “It focuses your attention on what is alive,” Drewexplains. “The architecture remains constant while the plants areever changing.” In the new living space, the polished concretefloors and kitchen bench, and fibre cement sheet ceilings, aresimple, clean and neutral. “It’s important for me to have a verysimple palette of materials that are as natural as possible so thebuilding has a handmade feel,” Drew says, and his emphasis oncraftsmanship is evident throughout the home as he creates housesthat not only feel handmade, but actually are handmade.

Drew and his team designed and constructed many of thefixtures, features and details on site, using raw materials such asconcrete and timber, and the clients duly describe it as “a housethat likes to be touched”. Concrete wall lights emit a golden glow;handles and handrails are carved from timber; doors and windowsare framed with blackbutt; a beautifully crafted wheel opens andcloses air vents; and the Moroccan decorative plaster technique of tadelakt has been used to cover the bathroom walls.

Despite being only 120-square-metres, the two-storey housefeels much bigger than its diminutive size due to the variationsin volumes, levels and interconnected spaces. Keeping the housesmall contributed to its efficiency during the build, and ongoing, assustainability played an important role in its design and function.

A rainwater tank stored beneath the courtyard in what was,appropriately, once a well, runs the washing machines and toilets.The concrete floors provide thermal mass while the rear roof formhas been angled to offer shade, shelter and privacy. Different sizedopenings for doors and windows regulate ventilation and eliminate the need for air conditioners and a series of flipper vents, derivedfrom chicken sheds, moderate airflow and temperature in theupstairs bedroom.

It’s hard to believe House of Gardens is just a few minutes walk from Newtown’s bustling and eclectic King Street. It is an introspective sanctuary that is serene and tranquil, forging a strong connection to nature, light and air in what is a characteristically historic, inner-suburban setting.