Mt Gibraltar

On a beautiful sun-drenched block of land in an established part of town sat a 50’s style brick home that just couldn’t be worked into the new design, so it had to be knocked down.

This is the third project we’ve carried out out for these particular clients, with the previous two projects being renovations and additions, so they were very excited to build a new home from scratch.

The brief to the Architect was to create a modern country home to sit neatly on the land and to maximise the Northerly aspect. The design consists of two main buildings connected in the middle by a flat roofed linkway. One building contains the everyday living areas and the master bedroom suite, while the other contains the children’s bedrooms, games room, bathroom’s, garage, and loft. The link is home to the laundry and guest bathroom, while the hallway doubles as a gallery. This allows the sun to enter to enter into both buildings nicely, and gave us a discreet location for the photovoltaic solar panels.

The dutch gables help to soften the ends of the building and reduce the impact on neighbouring properties. The mix of materials create a nice contrast to the building. The recessed band around the perimeter of the building is a prominent feature. Commercially framed, double glazed aluminium windows provide excellent insulation, while a hydronic heating system and a Cheminees Phillippe wood fire, ensure that this house will perform effortlessly in the cold Southern Highlands winters.

The loft rooms over the garage were created by utilising a clever truss design we had used on another project before. It allows the roof space to become rooms without the need for conventional floor joists, hand pitched rafters and so on. This space was set down for a later date project due to price restraints, but our truss design idea cut down on cost so much so, that it enabled the clients to stretch their budget to complete the works during the build and gain this fabulous extra space.

The interior of the house is very crisp and well detailed, with set plaster reveals to, windows, doors, and wall to ceiling junctions, select grade blackbutt timber flooring throughout, detailed bathrooms and wet areas, custom made joinery units everywhere and an amazing custom made oversized sliding door system that slides out of the wall to shut off the linkway to the main living areas.

This has been another successful partnership with the Architect and Clients for a third time, to create this wonderful home.