A Refined Life – Malvern House by Rob Kennon Architects
Delicately expanding on its existing lineage, Malvern House is the crafted reworking and magnifying of an original cottage to align with a revised contemporary brief. Rob Kennon Architects employs a conscious and carefully considered simplicity in proposing volumes that set the tone for a refined inner-urban life.
Set with the familiar and important fabric of freestanding cottages in Melbourne’s Malvern, the same-named home plays due homage to its past while carefully defining its future. Optimising on its wide site, the extension and renovation works see a less traditional approach emerge between boundaries, allowing access to natural aspects and a deliberate engagement with the landscaped rear garden space. While maintaining a contained and modest silhouette, the resulting works sink into the site and allow the expansion to offer the ideal portal between the old, new and greenspaces. Rob Kennon Architects combines an effortless refinement, for which the studio is known, with a considered restraint, offering a home that responds directly to its owners.
The existing home sits self-supporting and unconnected on both edges and is surrounded by its generous garden. The likely and common approach with these cottages involves upward expansion or a long linear extension, both of which did not align with the values of the client and how they wished to use their home. Instead, the full width of the site is used and becomes the inspiration. The strategy of building low and wide incites a pavilion typology, and a depth of scale is created through materiality. Removing the existing lean-to-built appendage, the living, dining and kitchen spaces combine within the one volume, which then opens outward and encourage free-flowing movement between the inside and outside realms.
Key to imbedding a sense of grandeur into the new space was the extended height created in the volumes added. By sinking the extension down four steps to align with the garden, there is not only a sense of change between eras but also a heightened sense of arrival when transitioning into the space. Stepping down another three steps to the kitchen and dining space, this anchoring mechanism is further reinforced, while also helping to define the spaces informally. Balancing between intimacy and openness, the spaces and resulting materiality employ contrast and textural variation to offer differentiation. Although seemingly simplified when viewing the parts compiled and in their final state, the crafted detail needed to enforce such seamless transitions was crucial to its success.
Optimising on its wide site, the extension and renovation works see a less traditional approach emerge between boundaries, allowing access to natural aspects and a deliberate engagement with the landscaped rear garden space.
Malvern House brings an elevated refinement to the traditional renovation and expansion project, combining craft and considered articulation. Rob Kennon Architects challenges the typical and beautifully adds meaningful connections between the old, new, inside and out.
