Modest simplicity: Ryde Street House

The expansion of Hobart was facilitated in part by the tram network established in the Tasmanian city during the 1890s. The arrival of the network and the city’s burgeoning population saw clusters of modest brick and timber cottages built in the suburb of North Hobart, a hilly area that benefitted from increased accessibility. More than 100 years later, architect Shamus Mulcahy purchased one of these worker’s cottages: a modest one-storey, single-fronted, co-joined house that had been typical of the area before the slum clearance program of the 1950s wiped out so many others like it.

Living in the house for 15 years, Shamus came to understand the flexibility of the simple cottage format. He initially shared the place with two schoolmates before it became his first home with his partner Kate, and it was subsequently rented out while the couple lived overseas for three years. Returning from London in 2011, Shamus and Kate were concerned that the tiny 83-square-metre cottage would not accommodate the next stage of their lives. Having investigated moving, they soon realized that the inner-city location provided great neighbourhood amenity, including the ability to walk to work. Rapidly rising property prices also highlighted the value in investing in their existing home rather than upscaling to a bigger and more expensive house that may still have needed additional work.

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Ryde Street House by Bence Mulcahy

Image: Adam Gibson

The arrival of their first child in 2013 was the catalyst for the initial stage of building works. The front bedroom and street-facing verandah were renovated, creating a pair of useful spaces that were connected to the outdoors and benefitted from natural light. Two years later, the arrival of their second child prompted the next stage of the renovations. Functionally, the family needed a larger living room, an additional bedroom and bathroom, a connection to the garden and more light in the living spaces. They also felt it was important that the new extension was “respectful and neighbourly,” preserving the local character of the streetscape and block pattern.

In order to add 52 square metres to the tiny cottage yet avoid any visual clues that the house had been extended, Shamus developed a strategy to reconfigure the internal volume, extruding the existing envelope and utilizing the gentle slope at the rear of the block to create a second storey. The original floor level now creates a landing for a split-level arrangement. The new bedroom and bathroom occupy the roof space on the upper floor while the ground floor is sunken 1.5 metres from the original to align with the level of the rear of the site. This establishes a new open-plan living space that is directly connected to the garden beyond. Three skylights admit daylight into the building, with a double-height void drawing sunlight into the deep plan of the ground-floor spaces. Together, the skylights and void create a delightful and constantly changing pattern as the sunlight moves around the space throughout the day, illuminating and highlighting different surfaces and objects.

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A screen of vertical battens gives a sense of warmth to the upstairs bedroom.

Image: Adam Gibson

A steel portal at the eastern end of the building frames and accentuates the house’s previously disguised asymmetrical section. A screen of vertical battens creates two-way privacy between the occupants and the neighbours and adds a sense of warm interiority to the bedroom. The original intention to retain the existing boundary walls of the house was abandoned for ease of constructing the new retaining walls, but the original bricks were recycled to create the new shell of the building. The reconstructed walls are left unrendered, allowing the traces of the bricks’ previous life to provide a subtly decorative surface that connects past to present. Similarly, the vertical tongue-and-groove boards that formed a dado around the original rooms are replicated in the new joinery, interweaving old and new.

A singular colour palette pays homage to the domestic context, with the red of the roof carried down to the garden fences and outbuildings, and back into the house through the joinery in the living room. On the upper floor, the red is tinted to create various shades of lighter pink. The bedroom is so faintly pink that it almost seems as if the colour is created by the light filtering through the screen beyond. The darker dado of the bathroom tiles is contrasted with a lighter panel above and this detail is carried through into the custom-made shower curtain.

An incredibly simple but deceptively rich project, Ryde Street House provides a wonderful model for updating the modest simplicity of tiny inner-city dwellings without compromising amenity or neighbourhood character. It also delivers a delightful series of spaces that can continue to adapt with the family during the next 15 years and beyond.