The Garden House
By Poly Studio
This project involved a comprehensive refurbishment and re-organisation of a dilapidated South Gippsland farmhouse in an established landscaped garden. The key driver of the design strategy was to engage the house with the surrounding garden. The layout of the single storey house was radically simplified through the demolition of an outer layer of rooms that blocked natural light and ventilation to the key rooms.
With a limited budget, strategic interventions were made to improve amenity and performance whilst also realising the latent potential of the existing house and its relationship with the surrounding garden. New insertions into the period fabric are clearly identifiable through a contemporary palette of colour and materiality. The new verandah reinstates the footprint and form of the original verandah but is re-imagined as a contemporary, timber box. It is wrapped with a screen of Silvertop Ash battens that creates an interstitial space – both inside and outside at the same time. An open stair creates a formal separation between the verandah and the house and connects down to a lower deck and the garden level.
Year: 2014
Builder: Brent Casbolt
Photos: Chloe O’loan
Professionals used in
The Garden House
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Poly Studio
About the
Professional
Poly Studio is passionate about designing contemporary and sustainable buildings that utilise clever design to provide the most amenity from the least resources. Led by Daniel Wolkenberg, the studio has considerable experience working on a broad range of projects large and small, including residential, multi-residential and mixed-use typologies.
We believe that the best design solutions emerge from an intensive and open process of collaboration with our clients. Our approach embraces the emergence of unique and responsive solutions from the design process itself in a positive feedback loop that exceeds what may have been imagined at the outset.
Our design approach seeks to embed each building into its specific time and place, responding with sensitivity to the unique constraints and opportunities of each site. We view sustainability as both a necessary ethical imperative but also integral to the challenge of making each building ‘fit for purpose’, both now and into the future. We look for the synergies within the overlay of budget, sustainability and performance to achieve the best performance for the least cost.
Poly Studio is registered with the Architects Registration Board of Victoria. We are members of the Australian Institute of Architects, Architeam and the Australian Passive House Association.
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