Cocoon with a view: Palmette

Architecture practice Sum named this project Palmette to represent how the renovation and addition unfurls from small and enclosed to expansive and light. The palmette, a decorative motif of stylized palm leaves, features in the interior of the original home – an 1885 terrace house in Melbourne’s Carlton – but Sum has not referred to it literally. Rather, the forms that extend into and expand out from the original front section are angular, abstract and minimal, not organic. Yet like the palmette, the design draws our attention to nature.

The spaces of the renovated home unfold at the top of the stairs, where a timber-lined cocoon channels views towards a panorama of green: a borrowed landscape dominated by the neighbours’ stand of silver birch trees. The drama is magnified by the fact that the floor stops a metre short of the windows, extending the field of vision down to the garden at ground level. The void between floor and window is covered only by an open-weave “hammock” at floor level rather than a balustrade, heightening the feeling of openness and spatial flow.

View gallery

A herb garden and kaffir lime tree grow on the terrace, within reach of the kitchen.

Image: Thurston Empson

As with many renovations to nineteenth-century terraced houses, the primary design drivers were to create a feeling of spaciousness and to provide ample natural light. “The idea was to have fewer but larger spaces, getting the biggest possible living space that could fit into it. The clients didn’t want to squeeze in four bedrooms,” says Finn Warnock, director of Sum. The first move was to lift the living spaces up, locating them on the first floor. Cutting the existing roof off at its apex, Sum introduced a gap between old and new rooflines, and provided a terrace next to the kitchen. The hammock-covered void at the western end of the living room gives light to the lower level and makes the main bedroom a partially double-height space. A timber-lined box on the ground floor hides the bathroom and powder room in the darkest part of the house. Walls are omitted where possible, resulting in liberating moments such as the freestanding bath, which is placed next to the bed in the main bedroom to offer the bather views of the garden. The back garden is small but verdant. Soon, its boundary walls will be covered in ficus climbing vines. Instead of using expensive brickwork, Sum formed these external walls from off-the-shelf concrete sleepers that are normally used in retaining walls, and stood them up vertically, embedded in a concrete footing. The same sleepers are used in lieu of decking outside the bedroom. If the neighbours ever decide to chop down the silver birches, the clients’ own trees will have grown to take their place.

Finn and practice co-director Jaslyne Gan have responded to the spatial and regulatory limitations of the site with ingenuity. Regulations regarding overlooking from the first floor were overcome by the use of the netted void, which ensures you stand back from the windows and thereby blinkers sideways views. The first-floor roofline broke the council’s heritage setback rules yet was ultimately approved on the basis that it would be invisible from the street. Storage is cleverly concealed within the existing roof space, accessed via the terrace, while a rainwater tank is hidden beneath the tiled verandah at the front of the house.

View gallery

Framed in Victorian ash, the fully glazed western facade is angular, abstract and minimal.

Image: Thurston Empson

The material palette is minimal, and the interior is dominated by sustainably sourced timber. Victorian ash is used as structural framing and on the floors, stairs and benchtops, and wall and ceiling linings are in smoked oak. The edge detail of the stair treads is repeated on the island bench, and a custom-designed timber bracket, jewellery-like in its attention to detail, handles the transition from benchtop to table legs. Plate steel provides a visual counterpoint, stained with a black patina finish. The bespoke linear pendant that runs the length of the living area was made from long flats of aluminium attached with industrial-strength double-sided tape normally used in the curtain walls of office buildings. It, too, is stained with a corrosion-look patina. Sum’s interest in fabrication and file-to-factory systems is evident in the design of a set of three small tables, made from laser-cut steel.

Palmette was something of a personal project, designed for Jaslyne’s sister and her family, and subtle allusions to the family’s Chinese Malay heritage can be found in certain elements of the house, such as the materiality of the terrace and the immediate connection forged between the main bedroom and the garden. The home is shaped by a suite of clever solutions to a challenging site, and the design’s emphasis on rich spatial experiences, rather than a preoccupation with creating more rooms, has resulted in a cocooning home that draws light in as it simultaneously draws our attention out, to nature.