Rose House 2
by Baracco + Wright Architects
The true beauty of the Rose House 2 by Baracco + Wright Architects is the ability of the architecture to bring a family closer together in a variety of ways.
The new house combines two residences in one volume. The renovated space now includes a 2 bedroom terrace type house for the adult children and a 3 bedroom + study house for the parents.
For this project theBaracco + Wright Architects team negotiated the complex site while hoping to create an enduring building with civic presence, extending the urban form of the historic Alfred crescent and also contribute to the typology of the wedge shaped buildings on similar sites throughout the inner suburbs of Melbourne. This triangular shaped site also allowed the architects to carry on their exploration of simple geometries.
The building is triangular in shape, filling the site, with a curved ‘point’ to the narrow south elevation. It takes cues from the many triangular shaped buildings found throughout the area with a simple geometrical form and a shallow front setback and reinterprets the brick historical buildings of its setting with some interpretation of rounded Art Deco geometry.
The program consists of a smaller house designed using the terrace typology – at just over 5 metres wide and 30 metres long – it continues the street pattern of the side street through its entry, setback and house type. The larger house faces the corner and it’s entry is literally the corner of the site. Although taking cues from the side street, the two houses are overall treated as one form.
The west facade is ‘solid’, punctuated sharply through few windows, presenting a ‘hard’ confident mass to the street. This condition disintegrates as the building moves around to its more intimate relationship with the reserve and busy street level (bike and pedestrian path) on the ‘softer’ east façade, where the materiality is a play of negative space, transparent mesh, pergola frames, reflection of trees in large windows and planting.
The form was also derived from the client’s desire to create interior spaces that generated privacy without detracting from the feeling of connectivity.
Both houses are open plan in design. In the larger house, the hit and miss brick work of the curved point creates a screened study, the undercroft space to the east creates a flexible outdoor yet sheltered space that mediates the ground floor living space to the reserve.
A roof deck sits discreetly within the roof line, taking advantage of an adjacent tree and adding to the varied type of outdoor spaces on offer.
To view more B + W inspired architecture head to their TLP Design Profile Page.
Keep up to date with The Local Project’s latest interviews, project overviews, collections releases and more – view our TLP Articles & News.
Explore more design, interior & architecture archives in our TLP Archives Gallery.
