This Heritage Home Gets a Contemporary Extension

This Heritage Home Gets a Contemporary Extension

An extension to this 140-year-old Victorian terrace house serves as a restrained counterpoint to the ornate original building and facilitates indoor-outdoor living. We spoke with architect Weian Lim, director of Melbourne firm WALA, to find out more about his approach to restoring the heritage building and designing the addition

Design Anthology: How did you first meet the client?

Weian Lim: The clients, a couple, found out about us through word of mouth.

Can you tell us about them and their lifestyle?

They were looking at living closer to the city and downsizing from their previous residence. Both maintain a highly active lifestyle and this lovely house was perfect in terms of size and proximity to nearby amenities. They loved entertaining family and friends at their previous home and wanted to continue this tradition in the new one. They also have adult children who visit often, so the house needed to be able to accommodate all the family members when they stay over.

What’s unique about the building and the location?

The house is one of a pair of two-storey single-fronted Victorian terrace houses that were originally built in 1878 and is part of the rich architectural history of this pocket of East Melbourne. As it’s a heritage dwelling, conservation of the facade was paramount, and we undertook the facelift with great sensitivity to retain its character and charm.

What’s the overall size of the house?

The plot itself is long and narrow, with a frontage of about six metres that’s typical of terrace houses of this ilk and era. The site is almost 220 square metres big, and the existing house had a total floor area of 215 square metres, which we increased by more than 10 square metres with the renovation.

What was the clients’ brief to you?

The brief started with the premise of keeping at least three bedrooms, conserving and restoring the existing heritage building and introducing a new rear extension on the ground level. The extension couldn’t be expansive without encroaching into the garden, so we were faced with the challenge of fitting as much as we could within a confined area.

The previous owners had undertaken a renovation to widen the footprint of the rear ground-level rooms in order to take advantage of the site’s full width, but this earlier renovation lacked a strong connection with the backyard, which had been neglected over time.

Our clients wanted the back of the home to open onto a low-maintenance garden and a functional outdoor living and entertaining area. The new addition had to be light-filled and spacious, and adopt where possible passive design principles that would make this space usable year-round. Although the new space had to feel contemporary and uncluttered, it was more important that the new interventions combine well with the heritage attributes and appeal of the old building.

One of the clients is an interior designer, so our working relationship was instinctively collaborative from the outset. Dealing with tight tolerances on site meant that we had to be creative in solving problems, and the collaborative nature of our relationship proved to be invaluable in this aspect.

How did you approach the project and what design references did you try to incorporate into the space?

We focused on using the rear extension as a way of contemporising the home while maintaining its historic character. We wanted to create a fluid passage through the building, and achieved this by creating an open-plan layout in the new extension and framing the end of the sightline with a large window and daybed that look onto the raised garden.

The new living space follows the original footprint of the rear room, but despite its modest size, is able to enjoy borrowed amenity from the garden through the large pivot doors and windows, making the space feel larger than it is. This sense of space is further accentuated by the large skylight in the kitchen and a notable absence of structural columns.

Please tell us a little about the material choices for the space.

We intentionally selected a restrained material palette for the rear extension to create a contrast with the original building and delineate the transition from the original space into the modern extension. Natural finishes like timber, concrete and steel, together with the simple geometries, are a counterpoint to the ornamental nature of the old house. 

Part of the brief called for general low maintenance. On the rear facade, for example, a simple concrete beam and column configuration is impactful while still being robust. Walls and ceilings are lined in timber veneer to soften the transition from painted plaster to raw concrete. The cantilevered concrete bench that links the interior and exteriors spaces provides maximum utility, and its beauty is in the workmanship, rather than just its appearance. 

The notion of ‘lightness’ is represented not only by how natural light is introduced into the space, but also through the interplay of materials. The concrete bench cantilevers off the wall, appearing weightless; a mirror panel below the kitchen counter playfully suggests that the counter is floating in space; the large, frameless skylight and windows are designed to background the layered textures within the space.    

A large brass-coloured rangehood in the kitchen anchors an otherwise open-plan space, and occasional references to this brass can be found throughout the house — be it in the PARACHILNA pendant, suspension lamp by Neri&Hu or the large hallway mirror — punctuating the generally muted palette.

Which of the features and pieces are custom designed?

We designed the extension’s steel pivot doors and window within a concrete portal frame to define the rear elevation and frame the garden. You can sit indoors on the floating daybed and feel as if you’re in the garden.

The concrete eave is intentionally designed to align with the angle of the sun during the winter solstice to maximise the amount of direct sun hitting the tiled floor, thereby storing as much heat as possible in thermal mass during the colder periods in the year.

The large frameless skylight opens the kitchen and living room up to the sky, drawing more light into the room and perfectly framing the existing brick storey above, acknowledging the history of the building that literally sits overhead, like a visual palimpsest.


Images / Derek Swalwell
Styling / Bea + Co

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