2021 Houses Awards: New House over 200m² – joint winner

Jury comment

Studio Bright’s 8 Yard House builds on centuries-old traditions of spaces for living outside. The courtyard is reinterpreted as eight outdoor rooms, which punctuate a dense house across a double-fronted lot in an inner-urban area of Melbourne. This outside space – sometimes yard, sometimes courtyard – is brought right to the facade, creating a deep and generous threshold to the house and offering transparency to the street through hit-and-miss brickwork.

Carefully detailed brickwork and relationships between the house and its courtyards, which are distributed along the length of the site, bring a looseness to the otherwise solid brick enclosure and restrained material palette. An unusual spatial richness is achieved through subtle variation in the stepped section, shifting room orientation and allowing adjacent rooms to borrow light and aspect from one another.

The outdoor spaces are rooms of equal value to their interior counterparts. Their interconnectedness layers a diversity of activity and inhabitation throughout the site. Crafted domestic moments and material celebration are dedicated to niches, corners and walls. This house invites a rich life.

The Award for New House over 200 m ² is supported by Brickworks. See full image galleries of all the winning and shortlisted projects here.

8 Yard House is located in Melbourne, Victoria, on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin nation.

Project credits

Architect: Studio Bright Project team: Melissa Bright, Robert McIntyre, Todd de Hoog, Maia Close, Pei She Lee Builder: Basis Builders Engineer: Meyer Consulting Landscape designer: Peachy Green Landscape contractor: Vogue Grange