This Mosman House Embraces Nature With An Architectural ‘Backyard Room’
On this renovation of a Mosman home, designing for the positioning and setting was simply as essential as designing for the household who lives there.
Home for BEES will get its title for its direct response to nature and the proprietor’s backyard, with its personal native beehive. But it surely’s additionally a superbly personalised dwelling for the purchasers, Sarah and Evan, mother and father to Barney and Eddie — whose names spell out the acronym referenced within the undertaking’s title.
Downie North principal Catherine Downie says the homeowners approached her staff to create a brand new addition for his or her single-level Federation dwelling, in substitute of a lean-to with a dated ‘70s kitchen, meals space and playroom and a backyard that felt ‘overshadowed’ and closed off.
‘The home because it was stored getting in the best way of with the ability to benefit from the panorama,’ Catherine says.
‘The fantastic thing about the positioning was the unusually deep yard the place the purchasers and youngsters would spend the vast majority of their time residing, cooking and enjoying within the backyard.
Tasked with making a passively operated dwelling that harnessed the weather and embraced the outside, Catherine says the 65-square-metre addition was conceived as a ‘backyard room’.
For the sake of each sustainability and finances, they retained as a lot as attainable of the prevailing home earlier than creating new kitchen, residing, and eating areas on the rear. These areas are ‘frivolously contained’ by a floating roof constituted of aluminium, folded to seize northern mild and easterly breezes. A hid air flow within the eaves then drags this air inside the home, passively cooling no matter the climate.
‘We love the simplicity of sitting underneath a cover with a gorgeous backyard round you, having fun with good meals with mates,’ Catherine explains. ‘Giant sliding doorways retract to fully dissolve the boundaries between inside and outside.’
The informal and comforting residing areas steadiness the architectural strains with cork flooring, chosen for its softness and environmental credentials. Reclaimed supplies have been one other essential a part of the design, as Sarah personally hand-cleaned all of the reclaimed bricks from the demolition of present partitions so that they might be utilized in backyard pathways. Along with the lightness of its design and footprint, Catherine says the home advantages from 18kW of photo voltaic panels, two 5000L rainwater tanks and the luxurious edible backyard, the place considerable fruit bushes and flowering crops present meals and shade to the property’s bees and visiting nature.
‘The home can speak in confidence to host fairly a big backyard celebration or be lovely place to get pleasure from a quiet cup of tea,’ she provides. ‘The home encourages an consciousness of the seasonal adjustments, watching native birds having fun with the backyard in addition to being a household centered place to get pleasure from one another’s firm.’
