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Architects: Freehand Projects
- Area: 294 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Steph McGlenchy
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Manufacturers: Big River Group, Dulux, Easycraft, Polytec, Supertuft, Weathertex
Text description provided by the architects. The original house was built in the early 1980s by a local builder and architectural draftsman who took inspiration from the casual modernism of the time made popular by practices such as Merchant Builders and Fasham Johnson. Often built as low-maintenance family beach houses, many similar homes are dotted around the Bellarine Peninsula and Surf Coast as the area expanded in the 1970’s and 80’s. As the region now undergoes another round of expansion and development, many are being replaced by larger luxury homes and townhouses.
Typically, the house is tightly planned, long, and low, with its north façade of full-height windows protected by a deep eave overhang facing the courtyard-style garden. Construction is simple and robust, with a heated concrete floor slab, double brick structural walls, and a metal tray roof at minimal pitch on Oregon beams. This lends a raw and visually rich texture to the interior, with face brickwork and internal linings of knotty pine. The owners have lived in the house since 2010, love the house, the street, and the neighborhood, and have spent years developing a thriving and productive permaculture garden complete with chickens, veggies, and a mini orchard. The house had great bones and excellent solar orientation, and the owners were keen to add another bedroom as their family grew and create more generous living spaces that would offer relief and contrast to the existing low ceilings.
A master plan was designed to extend, which saw the addition of a master bedroom and ensuite, a two-story void over the main living room, raising of the ceiling, a new front entry and stairwell, an extension of living spaces, a garage conversion, a sunroom, and a new roof deck. The design process ensured that every idea was explored and a few informal rules were set: keep it small; retain the garden; respect the original house, raw and textured elements only; quality over quantity; and no ‘overdoing’ things.
Materials were deliberately raw and robust in keeping with the nature of the existing house. Recycled pressed red bricks used in the original landscaping were dug up, cleaned, and reused again for the new masonry walls, including the angled brick pier that anchors the living room and frames views out to the garden. This is the third time around for these bricks as the original owner had salvaged them from old houses being demolished in Geelong in the 1970s and painstakingly cleaned them all by hand, so Freehand Projects respected this effort and incorporated them into the new design.
The old slate floor tiles were delaminating, so they were replaced with bluestone slabs in a nod to the NGV by Roy Grounds, one of the owners’ favorite buildings. Instead of plasterboard, Freehand Projects specified internal wall linings of grooved wall paneling, which adds visual texture and sits comfortably alongside the original pine lining boards elsewhere, and new ceilings are lined with off-the-shelf plywood for a warm timber look without the price tag. Externally, the extension is clad with Weathertex Weathergroove Woodsman panels - a zero-carbon 100% natural product made in Australia from waste timber and beeswax. Oregon battens at regular intervals add further dimension and life to the façade. Freehand Projects chose a light grey paint color to complement the melaleucas out the front of the house, which cast some beautiful shadows when the sun gets low in the evenings. At the same time, the hardwood window frames are stained to match the bark of the ancient Moonah trees so that they dissolve into the landscape when viewed from inside.
