A Sense of History – Limestone House by Winwood McKenzie
With an approach that makes the most complex of tasks seem effortless, and which finds poetry in even the most pragmatic of considerations, the Limestone House sees Winwood McKenzie gently yet purposefully adapt an 1855 Melbourne residence into a contemporary, character-rich family home.
The project required both discipline and a light touch to navigate its many challenges while also responding to the home’s unique qualities and layers of history. The design was informed by three key pillars: the clients’ brief, the heritage of the original home, and the constraints of the site. “The role of the architect is to synthesise all the elements of a project, its constraints and opportunities, and make them into a seamless design solution,” says Winwood McKenzie Principal Thom McKenzie. In the Limestone House, the synthesis of the three core aspects was guided by the intention for the new design to become the home’s next chapter, imbued with the same depth of character and richness of materiality as the existing building.
“The design process was research-driven,” Thom continues, “allowing us to understand more about the house. It was built in 1855, so is very old in the context of the city of Melbourne, and over the past 165 years had accumulated a whole collection of add-ons, so it was important to understand what was original and what was extended. [From there, we could understand] how the character had come about and how to design a response to it.”
Through this research, it was found that the house had undergone a renovation that accentuated its Georgian qualities during the interwar period, around the time that Australian composer Percy Grainger lived in the home. The architects honed their understanding of not only the house’s original details but its materiality and proportions, the quality of its light and the emotional resonance of its spaces. With this understanding, a design language that responded to these essential aspects of the original home was created.
The age of the house added further complications to an already-demanding site, with both the building and its neighbour originally constructed on brick and bluestone footings. Allowances needed to be made to ensure an adjacent 100-year-old elm and slightly younger linden tree were protected, while limited space within which to work on the site and a lack of privacy as a result of neighbouring blocks of flats also had an impact.
Out of such complexity, the challenge lay in arriving at a resolution that felt effortless and therefore fitting, distilling the qualities of the original home and maintaining the patina that had developed with time while adding the space and amenity required by a family of five. “That led us to preserve the front rooms and the façade intact and have the building exist in the streetscape in the same way that it always has. Around that, we created a four-bedroom house stitched together in a way that is seamless with the existing house,” Thom explains.
The new does not mimic the old but instead sympathetically captures its gestures and qualities. Far from an exact reproduction, it is perhaps better understood as a reverberation, or a call and response, with the contemporary elements answering the old and, in doing so, coming together to create a sense of unity. “We wanted the new to have the same richness of character as the old,” says Thom. “Often, that richness comes through storytelling by using the medium of architecture, which people can perceive intuitively – they can feel that there’s a story behind the design, and they fill in the gaps, relate to it and connect with it in different ways.”
By adopting the devices of Georgian architecture, the Limestone House becomes a contemporary evocation of the heritage original. A paired stair around a pond, an arched colonnade of CNC-milled limestone, decorative vaulted ceilings that are an extrusion of the arched facade, bedrooms each painted a different colour, a kitchen that references a traditional Welsh dresser, the casting of light and shade by the arched, narrow-mullioned windows and glazed doors – each element harks back while maintaining a considered, contemporary presence.
It is in the material palette that the relationship is most subtle yet also most powerful. Limestone, timber, marble, steel, lime render and hard plaster may not be exclusive to Georgian building, but in both quality and application the resonance is palpable. It is a reflection on the complicated legacy of British colonial architecture of the Commonwealth, and in these materials lies an accumulated shared knowledge of architecture and the transformation of resources.
Thom recalls that people of many different nationalities, from Scotland to India, who have visited the project have found characteristics that are familiar and resonate with them. “I thought it was very exciting that it meant different things to different people and that it wasn’t a generic contemporary solution,” he says. “The narrative of the house is one of a colonial history of architecture, which is obviously a complicated global history, and that’s why people from different backgrounds and nationalities respond to it. The architecture has enough presence to evoke these rich responses in people.”
The materials are those that grow more meaningful with time. “It may be quite pragmatic, but materials that are very durable are going to age over time and become richer for that use,” Thom reflects. “So in the same way that stone façade buildings, solid timber floors and limestone walls have existed for hundreds of years, we’re using that knowledge of architecture to create something new that could do the same – there’s an ambition that this becomes part of the history of this site, another chapter in the life of the building and the place.”
On this basis, Winwood McKenzie sought to not only keep the original structure but to ensure that the patina was undisturbed by the new interventions. It was not enough to simply maintain the balustrade of the original stair intact – it was important to preserve the integrity of the wood that has been worn smooth by countless hands over more than a century. “It’s over 160 years old, and if you refinished it all that would be lost,” Thom says. “So, we made sure to cover it during construction. This is just one example of the care taken to preserve the character of the home.”
Preservation on the one hand and adaption on the other may seem to be competing imperatives. Yet the Limestone House exemplifies how not only may a delicate balance be achieved but the line between the two may be blurred, moulded and reshaped to the extent that it ceases to exist entirely. Skillfully and emotively stitched together, the old and the new, the preserved and the adapted, create the next era in the home’s rich history.
