Lean 2

by Ben Callery Architects

With the Lean-two project Ben Callery Architects put a new spin on the quirky and quaint elements of the typical lean-to, creating a compact but spacious, bright and airy addition onto an existing house with a difficult orientation.

We live in an age where social media places a huge emphasis on image which encourages consumption, size and excess. By contrast this house celebrates modesty of scale and quality of space and simplicity of materials and detailing. The ethos of doing more with less.

The classic Australian lean-to design features three walls and a single pitched roof abutting a taller existing building as an appendix to the original, fulfilling a new need. They often come in twos or threes getting progressively smaller like a row of babushka dolls. Despite their modest scale and tight spaces, they offer some positives that are worth replicating or at least reinterpreting. This was the modus operandi behind Ben Callery Architects Lean- two project.

The owners, a young family of four, needed more space for their family to grow. They wanted flexibility to allow the house to adapt to changing needs and to accommodate visiting extended family members. They wanted a degree of openness to facilitate connections between family members. They sought greater connections with the elements, warming sun and cooling breezes, to create natural comfort and reduce their environmental footprint.

The main challenge on their site was the orientation, north to front, making it difficult for the living rooms at the back of the house to engage with the sun. They chose to keep their existing house, even though it wasn’t heritage listed and had that challenging solar orientation. It probably would have been more cost effective to demolish but the reasons to retain and renovate were numerous.

Ben Callery Architects retained the existing high pitched roof over the front four rooms and the low adjoining roof form of the original lean-to. BCA used the classic single pitch skillion roof but rather than tuck it under the existing roof (as the usually do) it projects high over it creating a clerestory highlight window to get sun down into the new living rooms.

BCA inserted a north-west facing courtyard which is a compact but sunny occupiable outdoor space. It’s operable folding arm awning allows it to adapt to all seasons. The courtyard facilitates cross views from the man living space into the flexible studio space across the courtyard. This partly relocated that sense of views through rooms typical of lean-tos but meets the contemporary need for passive interaction between occupants allowing them to supervise and be in contact while not necessarily in the same room.

The roof form, 4m high at the northern end over the clerestory, takes dramatically downwards to be only 2.7m at the southern end, replicating that sense of modest scale and negligible visual bulk when viewed from the back yard which is so important on a site with this orientation.

Materials are modest and domestic but honest, natural and robust. Concrete floor, plywood ceiling, timber windows, exposed rafters, recycled brick pavers and folding arm awnings are all part of the architectural vernacular of the lean-to but put together in a refined way to elevate them from simple domestic construction.

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