Roofscape House Carlton, Melbourne real estate, Australian home, Contemporary residential architecture photos
Roofscape House in Carlton
31 July 2023
Design: Antarctica Architects
Location: Carlton, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Photos by Derek Swalwell
Roofscape House, Melbourne
The Roofscape House project extends an existing single front terrace to provide a young family with room in which to live, work and grow. A previous alteration had renovated the kitchen and provided a new living and dining area; this new addition adds a study/guest room, two bedrooms upstairs and provides a ground floor family room.
The ambition of this renovation was to add a new layer of spaces in a way that was different – almost opposite – to the arrangement of the terrace below. We wanted the addition to alter the way that the house and its surroundings were experienced: to address a narrow site in a way that avoided placing a corridor down one side and resisted the urge to push each space to the boundaries.
We thought that this would make the new spaces of the house better connected, more adaptable and therefore available for use by the entire family. By making the building above narrower than the one below – effectively bringing the boundary even further in – we opened these spaces to views and breezes.
To do this the plan is stretched along the length of the existing house, widening to touch each boundary in the centre of the house and narrowing at each end. At the centre is a void that connects the family room on the ground floor to the upstairs spaces. On each side of this void we placed a room that was also used for circulation, minimising any space that felt like a corridor.
This collection of spaces in the centre of the house was then bookended by the bedrooms. At the street end the bedroom pushes into the roof space of the existing house creating a room with the odd proportions of an attic; an interesting bedroom for a young girl. At the other end, this narrowing to the clients’ bedroom is used to gain internal height while minimising any overshadowing or overlooking to the neighbours’ rear yards.
In many ways the addition is an attempt to absorb the amenity of the inner suburb into the house. Tightly arranging the spaces of the addition and visually connecting them through each other to the outside strengthens this effect. As an object it is clearly different to the house it sits on, but one that reflects the roof-forms and colours of its surroundings.
Roofscape House in Carloton, Victoria – Building Information
Design: Antarctica Architects – https://antarc.com.au/
Architects: Graham Crist, Simon Whibley and Nicola Garrod
Project size: 175 sqm
Site size: 252 sqm
Completion date: 2010
Building levels: 2
Photography: Derek Swalwell
Roofscape House, Carlton, Melbourne images / information received 310723
Location: Carlton, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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