2023 Houses Awards: House Alteration and Addition under 200m²

Jury comment

Exceptional houses are always idiosyncratic in some manner or form. They are about making space in place, with context critical to the recipe: it drives the architect and helps shape or define the nature of the lived experience.

This adaptation of a narrow cottage in Melbourne’s Fitzroy fully embraces its gritty urban context. The design maximizes its site, hugging all perimeter boundaries in the process. It is a courtyard house made to work exceedingly hard to accommodate the stuff of life. The courtyard is a literal extension or, more pointedly, an extrusion of the form, with living arrangements stretched visually and programmatically into the outdoors. It is both playful and finely wrought, a very personal examination of what makes a home.

This highly perceptive exploration of living arrangements uses the material elements of the structure to demarcate space in a decidedly crafted and unusual way. There is simply no room to not have fully fleshed out the brief. All spaces work hard to fulfil their function as well as to imbue the next with a flavour, or a continued thread of delight.

Ultimately, this is an interior landscape, a highly individual home fully confident in its approach.

The Award for House Alteration and Addition under 200m² is supported by James Hardie. See full image galleries of all the winning and shortlisted projects here.

For more coverage, read the project review by Michael Macleod.

Sunday is built on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of the Kulin nation.

Project credits

Project team: Michael Roper, Nick James, Angus Hamilton, Daria Selleck Builder: Grenville Architectural Construction Engineer: Measure Engineering Landscape designer: Amanda Oliver Gardens