House in Point Lonsdale
The house at Point Lonsdale was a playful extension of an old Merchant Builders House that needed extra space. The site is slightly raised from the road, and Lake Victoria and the Lonsdale Lakes Wildlife Reserve are to the northwest. The existing house needed recladding, and the addition had to be towards the front due to a lack of space at the rear. As such, and after several design propositions, the client said yes to an ambitious proposal for a double-storey addition at the front that would twist on the upper level. Hence, the building looked over the wetlands to the northwest with a twist of 15 degrees from ground level to the roof.
A finer grain of exposed structure was needed to tesselate the twist of the building and allow cladding to fit between it without being overstretched by the geometry. This grain was achieved by using exposed treated timber set on a steel subframe that tessellated the form and produced a framework to work with for the finer elements of the building and the geometry. The level one plan was oriented 7.5 degrees, as it was halfway up the rotation. It created interesting possibilities for window placement within the grain of the structure and the shape of the wall in the plan as the depth changed from the bottom of the window to the top by up to 250mm for the higher and wider windows. Several deep square galvanised steel apertures were placed in the rotated form to keep the larger operable windows square. The deepest allowed a delicate glass louvred box surrounding the staircase to act as a gasket between the original merchant builders house's hard rectangle and the new and rotated addition. Smaller windows were skewed in fabrication to follow the finer grain of the timber structure.
Internally, timber battens were used on the lining and treatment of the internal walls. They help articulate the geometry of the house and the translation of outside to inside and increase the grain of structure to a much finer level. A nice moment occurs at the top of the stairs, where the staircase meets the warped internal walls. The battens continue free of the wall beneath to allow for a softer fraying of the internal linings to increase the connection of the living space to the entry.
The project's success is held in the twist of the extension, and the different scales of grain that move from large to small, allowing the project to work on every level.
