Ivanhoe Houses

The site is located in the leafy suburb of Ivanhoe, Victoria. The clients came to us with a brief to create two well sized town houses, each with 3 bedrooms, 2 bath and generous opening living, aside from the spatial requirements, the clients wanted a house which connects well with the garden and one that is incorporates sustainable principles. With the site tapering away at the rear, the most common townhouse siting approach will be to adopt a ‘tandem’ layout, this unfortunately will create a long concrete driveway most of the way down one side of the lot, aesthetically this forms quite a hash street facade, but it also means we’ve lost a lot of valuable land area. Alternatively, we’ve borrowed the tapering angles from the site to form the ground floor footprint, this allows us now to build two ‘side-by-side’ townhouses. Internally, an angled wall can be difficult to utilised, so we’ve designed a timber bench to run along the width of the wall which forms the a bench for the dining room table and also a TV stand for the living room. Full height sliding doors to both North and South ends of the open living area allow plenty of natural light and promotes cross ventilation. The north facing sliding doors lead out into a central courtyard, the eave around the northern doors are designed to promote passive solar gain, by cutting out the summer sun, while letting the winter sun flow through. To the first floor, the master bedroom looks out over the street, with full width windows the room captures a wide picture view of the surrounding neighbourhood. A window planter box at the window introduces are touch of greenery to the upper floor.  photographer: MODO