Warm Breeze—Melbourne Garden Performs Acrobatics to Find Sun
A Melbourne garden performs acrobatics to find sun and, in doing so, becomes a healthy home for creatures great and small, and an engine room for many a meal.
A graceful steel spiral stair provides external access from the back garden to the side terrace.
This sweet housing for the internal stair in the shed offers wind and rain protection for the above conservatory/roof deck and security for below.
The nifty use of common wire mesh fencing over curved arches looks so good and is perfect for growing shade. Cut-outs have been included to help with pruning the outside.
Reflected ripples from the twin ponds in the open entrance create movement of light in the centre of the house.
The new lightwell in the centre of the house solves the problem of dark rooms common in terrace houses.
A perfect secure feature, this pond-lined entrance provides solutions with light in all the adjacent rooms as well as offering a restful view.
Shadows that play with paintwork in the foreground add a fresh and animated glimpse of this practical and beautiful garden design.
A Melbourne garden performs acrobatics to find sun, becoming a healthy home for creatures and an engine room for many a meal.
A sweet rejoining of two separate dwellings back to its original whole, this inner-city house is by architects Austin Maynard, who came to the design with the clients’ desire for a comprehensive edible garden front of mind. Fast forward to the end of construction where a blank slate awaited landscape designers Chin Liew Studio who were ready to step in and help guide the owners with plant selections.
Blurring the line between landscape design and architecture, Ray Dinh from Austin Maynard integrated both structures
and spaces for planting into the house’s design. The carport and garage at the end of the garden was transformed into a designated food growing area on the roof with a room above and below removed to create a gorgeous internal lightwell with attached planters and twin water features.
“We took the roof off and put a wall in there to make it a bit of an enclosed shed and added a spiral staircase to get access
to the top level,” says Ray. “Then we added this great curved roof garden structure/enclosure to the top of the roof. Our aim with the whole project was to remove space and combine it. We wanted to do more with less.”
It was at a very early stage that the garden, and its role, were front and centre of the design thinking. “Architect-designated
areas for soft plantings were created [and] all included in the original design to be planted out,” says Ray. Once the build
was complete, the owners looked for someone to help with the plantings. Luckily for them, the Melbourne International Garden Show had just opened, and they came across a garden by Chin Liew Studio. The garden, titled Moving Forces: The Great Pollinators, won the Emergent Gardens Award with the given theme of Pollinators and Pollination. Here, Chin explored the relationship between the stillness and movement of wind, water, insects, birds and other animals and how to consider them in
design.
Owners Hilton and Vaan recognised the importance of having healthy wildlife to help grow food and, with a new configuration of beds and a south-facing backyard, required some specific advice. “Chin is the expert in picking the right plants for the south-facing area. We get a tiny bit of sun in winter, but in summer … we just get nothing,” says Vaan. “She has chosen beautiful plants for our side terrace too. Although they are in planters, we can’t believe how much they have grown and the cut-outs in the wire mesh are a perfect way to prune and keep them in check as they grow.”
In the darker areas of the garden, the architects installed concrete sleepers as steppers in between the beds and Chin has chosen a selection of endemic species to soften the edges and create links between the plantings. “It looks wonderful when it is all in full bloom in spring, but we have created a seasonal garden, there is always something to look at,” says Chin. “Although it’s less than a year old, we have already done quite a bit of pruning and culling … we chose natives, many of them native to Fitzroy and they absolutely took off. We found they were smothering things a little bit, so we have had to reign them in!”
One of the focal points they wanted to maintain in this area is a magnificent lemon tree, to which special care was given during the build to protect it. It is thought to be between 30 and 40 years old and it is not unusual to collect over a dozen daily lemons to share with neighbours. Vaan is a hugely enthusiastic edible gardener and often decides on a meal by what she has growing in her self-watering beds. And with a suite of worm farms keeping the fertiliser in-house, the rooftop’s protected position in full sun is heaven for productive plants. When you can see a multi-flowering tomato bush in July, in Melbourne, you know some sound decisions have been made to get there.
chinliew.com.au
maynardarchitects.com
