Extension

The Lacuna House embraces a typical suburban brief – to create a haven away from a busy work-life and a safe home in which to raise children and live life. In doing so, the design realizes these common aspirations with a subtle overlaying of functional and aesthetic requirements to create new spaces, flows, and internal views while combatting the negative aspects of the site’s context. By focusing on the lacuna of the site – the unfilled spaces or gaps – the design reconciles built form with the landscape, and places a new pool as the connecting element that brings the site together. Located on Sydney’s leafy north shore, poor local planning decisions had overtime allowed two neighboring properties to compromise the setting for the inter-war dwelling.

From an exclusive hotel proposal, Greenhouse, at Felissimo Exclusive Hotel in Balneário Camboriú, aims to link architecture and nature through the available technologies, sustainability principles and the harnessing of the local conditions.

It’s the extension of a long house dating from the famous battle of Waterloo, lost as you know by Napoléon!

The client’s aim was to create a contemporary extension to a historic family home, offering flexible spaces, whilst ensuring the addition fit sympathetically within its context. As privacy and security is important within a family home, the design will create a balanced relationship between large open living areas and private spaces. With both a south/ east facing garden it was important to maximise the natural light into the new spaces to negate any dark zones. The proposal, although contemporary in form, will blend in harmoniously with the surrounding and respect the Old Vicarage’s character. 

Hackney Backhouse is a brave, imaginative and contemporary back-garden house that volunteers itself to the street through louvered screens of weathering steel, affording fleeting glimpses into the house to passers-by. The two-story, three-bedroom family home is neatly tucked onto an 11m by 8m site in a Hackney Conservation Area, formerly occupied by a run-down garage and workshop. Keen to avoid divorcing the house from its context and its neighborhood, Guttfield Architecture designed a house with a direct visual relationship with the street – the house is part of the street and the street part of the house. A screen of vertical corten louvers between the house and the street is intended as a simple device to moderate this two-way relationship, firstly by actively engaging the street and secondly, by bringing the street into the house, all while retaining privacy where needed.

Aging in the Lorraine region, and more precisely in the Meuse, in Vaucouleurs, nursing homes are not hospitals, and the time when these homes were over-sanitized and impersonal seems to be over. We were eager to suit the preferences of the occupants, who have a taste for noble materials, light, proportions and, to put it simply, architecture.

This addition opens up to an established back garden in the leafy suburb of Ivanhoe. Seven metre wide doors slide away and broad timber steps descend into the garden. A massive but finely detailed facade screen modulates northern sunlight in the main living area. The algorithmic pattern of the facade screen was inspired by foliage and textile patterns.