Socially Focused – Alexandria House by Passer Architects

Through a playfully social focus, Alexandria House sees the renovation and expansion of an existing heritage worker’s cottage to openly welcome its owners’ love of entertaining. Passer Architects proposes a series of crisp insertions and elevations that open and illuminate the established home.

Nestled into the same-named inner Sydney locale, Alexandria House is transformed and opened up from its prior dilapidated self, becoming a crisp and contemporary family home. While the new works emphasise expanding a sense of generosity and volume internally, the preservation of the existing heritage frontage remained a key focus. On its relatively narrow allotment, maximising the potential and limitations of the heritage worker’s cottage form meant devising a methodology of restraint and a pared-back palette to ensure a consistency throughout. In creating the home to a growing family, Passer Architects navigates the fusing of old and new through integrating an inherent robustness to ensure a longevity over time. While funnelling an openness that extends out to the rear garden, increasing the sense of scale, the living area is extended to the outer edges of the site boundary.

In creating the home to a growing family, Passer Architects navigates the fusing of old and new through integrating an inherent robustness to ensure a longevity over time.

Built by Pioneer Projects with Wilmont Joinery, Alexandria House extends both outward deeper into the site and up to an additional level above. Key to the additions is the embedded flexibility of function, allowing for program changes over time and for the changing needs of its family as they grow. A shared openness is integrated into the revised planning, which then extends to the relationship between inside and out, encouraging a togetherness and the dissolving of traditional boundaries. As one of the core functions of the home, the revisions needed to allow for entertaining and facilitate groups comfortably co-occupying spaces.

Once known as the worst house on the street, the newly revised residence now makes its own statement. Removing the inherited and badly conceived renovations over time ensured a clean slate from which to start layering in the new elements. Previously held up structurally by its neighbours, the home was stripped back to its original frontage only, with the remainder of the home rebuilt from the ground up. Through a sculpting within the original site constraints, a four-bedroom home emerges with the original dormer windows reinstated to retain the previous streetscape outlook. Through an optimising of openings both to vertical planes and through skylights where possible, the resulting home becomes inwardly lit.

A shared openness is integrated into the revised planning, which then extends to the relationship between inside and out, encouraging a togetherness and the dissolving of traditional boundaries.

Through an inviting and comfort driven approach, Alexandria House sits as a welcome embrace for its guest and residents, offering itself now as one of the most polished homes on its street.