The fortified tower and the walled garden are intriguing motifs for a suburban house extension. On one hand, these elements are essentially defensive, speaking to ideas of individualism, security and territory. On the other, they are ancient city archetypes that capture the collective imagination, inviting a public gaze. With its two small towers bracketing a screened courtyard, Studio Bright’s Garden Tower House brings to mind both of these possible readings.
This recently completed project is located in Melbourne’s Cremorne, a small urban enclave located on the northern bank of the Birrarung (Yarra River) and a short distance from the CBD. This area of Wurundjeri land was occupied as a colonial pleasure garden and then a private asylum during the nineteenth century before being subdivided into housing and factories. Today, its built fabric mostly comprises remnant Victorian-era worker’s cottages and industrial warehouses, though the factory workers are long gone and the warehouses are occupied by tech and media companies.
The high-ceilinged lounge is light-filled yet private thanks to the decorative and defensive breezeblock skin.
Image: Rory Gardiner
Garden Tower House is a semi-detached, weatherboard worker’s cottage that has been modified and extended into an elegant three-bedroom family home. The ground floor of the extension consists of a kitchen, dining room and lounge enclosing an open-air courtyard, with a main bedroom, ensuite and roof deck above. Wrapping the new volume is a monolithic skin of star-patterned concrete breezeblocks. This skin acts as a privacy screen, brise-soleil and balustrade, unifying openings and areas of solid wall beneath a continuous surface. Manufactured in a custom terracotta colour and precisely mitred at its corners, the breezeblock facade provides defence and decoration in a single gesture.
As is typical of residential alterations and additions in heritage conservation areas, the single-storey front portion of the cottage has been retained and restored, with mostly internal modifications. The double-storey extension is concentrated to the rear of the lot, separated from the front rooms by a slender lightwell. Typically, this rear addition would be obscured behind the roof line and hidden from the street. Here, however, the new volume has a more visible and public dimension.
Narrow garden pockets will allow plants to climb the house’s exterior surfaces.
Image: Rory Gardiner
Running along the house’s northern side boundary is a narrow night-cart lane. Garden Tower House takes advantage of this long northerly aspect and co-opts the laneway as its primary address. The breezeblock skin provides a permeable and performative elevation to the lane, while slatted timber screens can retract to enable direct courtyard access. Guerilla gardening in the lane by Studio Bright further blurs the line between public and private realms. So far, none of the other dwellings on the lane have taken advantage of Studio Bright’s activation of their common space, but it is easy to imagine a fine-grain urbanism of granny flats, vegetable gardens and bike sheds emerging off the lane: a miniature town centre tucked in behind the drab sameness of the suburban front setback.
All of Studio Bright’s projects marry invention and execution. Detailed by project architect and associate Emily Watson, who worked alongside Studio Bright’s director for design realization Rob McIntyre, every inch of the building envelope has been painstakingly considered. Here, success is as much about what you don’t see as what you do. The dimensions of the design have been determined by the width of a breezeblock and, in the bathrooms, a tile. There are no visible expansion joints to break the flow of the terrazzo floor between kitchen and lounge, and the steel columns that support the breezeblock facade are rotated to reduce their apparent thickness. On the ground floor, household services are ensconced within a thickened party wall and, on the roof deck, an airconditioning condenser unit, bar fridge and barbecue are all meticulously housed and concealed.
In the taller tower, the main bedroom is a private realm. Sculptures: Bruce Rowe.
Image: Rory Gardiner
Writing in the fifteenth century, Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti mused about the connection between the city and the individual house. “If … the city is like some large house, and the house is in turn like some small city,” he pondered, “cannot the various parts of the house … be considered miniature buildings?” While we often talk about how residential design is shaped by its urban environment, it is also worth considering what a house might contribute back to the city.
The miniaturized towers, walled garden and public street of Garden Tower House demonstrate multiple ideas for densifying and enlivening our residential streets. The house responds to density at the scale of the individual lot, increasing the inhabitable area and maximum occupancy of the dwelling without eroding the prevailing street pattern. The new extension provides a destination at the end of the alleyway, encouraging other residents to use it as a public thoroughfare and not just a bin lane. The extension’s perimeter is private but permeable, inviting neighbourly interaction. Finally, the design is playful and imaginative, reasserting the importance of dreaming, fun and enchantment in the everyday fabric of our lives, qualities that are sorely lacking in much recent development.
