THE BRIEF: The Architecture Comes First, or Does It?

Although the people living there have quite a lot to say about it too.

One of the things I love about working in Sydney is that you never quite know what is going to be behind the front door.

Art Deco apartment. Victorian terrace. Federation home. Mid Century. The occasional 1980’s or 1990’s number that is very keen to remind you it was built in the 1980’s or 1990’s.

And I love all of them.

Because I have never really been interested in walking into a house and imposing a particular “look”. I would much rather work out what is good about the home first, what absolutely isn't, and what we can do to make the two get along.

The architecture usually gives you a few clues.

But it is only half of the brief.

The other half is the people who actually have to live there.

The house is only half the story

Before I start moving walls around in my head, I want to understand the people using the space.

How do the people using the space actually live?

Who cooks? Who works from home? Are there small children who will very quickly become enormous teenagers? Do grandparents stay? Is everyone fighting over one bathroom at 7.30 in the morning? Do you entertain twenty people or would you rather have dinner with four?

And just as importantly, what might life look like in five or ten years?

A renovation is a significant investment. Designing only for the exact moment you are living in now can be surprisingly short sighted.

Children grow up. Families change. We work differently. We entertain differently. Sometimes accessibility becomes important. Sometimes the playroom needs to become a study, or the study needs to become a bedroom. Equally there are some clients where the property was only intended as a stepping stone to the next more permanent abode.

Good spatial planning should leave a little room for life to happen.

For me, the brief sits somewhere between understanding the building you have, the life you live now and the life that home may need to support next. It can also be about taking a client’s unique style and melding it in so it feels part of the space and indeed brings their character wholeheartedly into the design.

That is usually where the interesting decisions begin.

Old doesn't automatically mean good

I love original detail. I will happily get very excited about an old fireplace, beautiful proportions or a piece of joinery that has somehow survived decades of renovations.

But I don't believe something deserves to stay simply because it has been there for 80 years. Although I have been known to say it is against my religion to demolish an original fireplace!

Some old floor plans simply do not work, after all they were meant for a different era, and a different style of living. A building that is more than 100 years old is unlikely to have been built with a crystal ball of what the future demographic or requirements of a home in today’s society might be.

Kitchens were hidden away. Storage was apparently optional. Bathrooms turn up in places no reasonable person would put them today.

So the question I tend to ask isn't:

What can we keep?

It is:

What is worth keeping?

In a Randwick Art Deco apartment, there was plenty worth keeping. The challenge was bringing that character back while opening up the layout so the apartment actually worked for the person living there now.

Clovelly was another Art Deco apartment, but a completely different brief.

The building mattered. The coastal location mattered. But most importantly, the person living there mattered.

The design needed to support a client living with the complications of old age, which meant thinking carefully about safety, accessibility and how intuitively she could move around her home.

The important part was that none of that should announce itself.

It still needed to feel like a beautiful Clovelly apartment. Not a clinical space with some nice tiles added. If anything design, and calming design, becomes more important when we find ourselves requiring to spend more time in a space. Accordingly these projects were in the same part of Sydney, the same era, yet required a completely different answer.

Which is rather the point.

Then there was Stanmore

This one was particularly interesting.

A beautiful Federation home.

Clients who loved Mid Century furniture and design.

Technically, these two things are not supposed to be dating.

But I thought they got along rather well.

Making the house resolutely Federation would have respected the building but ignored the people living in it. Turning it into a Mid Century pastiche would have done the opposite.

So we worked somewhere in between.

The Federation architecture became the backdrop, while cleaner Mid Century influences came through in the furniture, joinery and detailing.

The concept sketches from this project are ones I come back to often because they illustrate something I feel quite strongly about.

Respecting the architecture does not mean recreating the past.

Your home still has to belong to you.

And sometimes there is no heritage argument at all

Kingsford is a 1980s detached house.

No decorative cornices to rescue. No debate about whether something is original.

Just an impractical laundry and powder room, a master ensuite and walk-in robe that weren't working hard enough, and a floor plan asking to be reconsidered.

And strangely enough, the process was exactly the same.

What works?

What doesn't?

What does this family actually need from these rooms?

And will those spaces still make sense as their needs change?

Can we find better space rather than automatically asking for more of it?

This is usually where I start long before anyone is choosing stone.

Which, admittedly, is less exciting than standing in a stone yard falling in love with a slab of marble.

But a beautiful piece of marble has yet to fix a bad floor plan.

Character isn't a design style

I talk quite a lot about homes with character, but I don't necessarily mean heritage homes.

A Mid Century house has character.

A Victorian terrace has character.

An Art Deco apartment certainly has character.

Even a 1980s house can have character once you've persuaded it to give up a few of its more questionable decisions.

And we must never forget the reflection of the character of the client living in or using the space.

For me, character is simply the thing that makes a home distinctly itself.

The trick is working out what that is before you start changing it, and then understanding what the people living there need from it.

Because the best renovation isn't necessarily the one where everything is new.

It's the one where the architecture, the people and the way they live all make sense together.

Not just on the day they move back in, but hopefully for a good few years afterwards.

Just with considerably better storage.