This city home has had many different, drastic alterations since it was built in the 1920s. Our clients envisaged their future life here as like living in an apartment, where they could work from home and still be within the larger home with their big family. We endeavoured to create a robust sense of horizontal space for them, elevated above the road, floating over the inner harbour and filled with natural light. We have embellished the street face with two projected copper-clad bay windows; a reference to the original home. These bay windows were detailed to evoke a constructed, welded, maritime feel, drawing a sense of connection with the cavalcade of ships that pass across the bay below.

We introduced a visual conversation between the vertical and horizontal elements of this home, combining to add an adjective to the sentence of built forms as they tumble down the crescent to the sea below.

The kitchen is an expressive form of domestic art, melding old and new, blending an original timber window with complementary white brick pattern tiles and black gloss joinery. The island bench floats over its skirted base of hewn and colour stained native timber planks. Clear and robust details combine to provide a coastal, urban feel, framing the ever-changing views of the capital.

Sandblasting to some of the windows supports the artistic intentions of the owners. The exterior colours have been used to express the built form and highlight the entrance, while interior colours are calm, cool and sophisticated. There is now a contemporary revitalisation of this house, an inspired celebration of domestic spatial form and living possibilities.