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the side of the old cottage and enters the
house after passing alongside a courtyard.
By choreographing movement across the
site in defiance of traditional patterns,
Coy Yiontis carefully orchestrated the
occupation of the ground plane and
restructured the entire site.
Like many Coy Yiontis houses the
overall result is inward-focused, but
the plan ingeniously multiplies vistas
throughout the house. While the
living spaces wrap around the central
courtyard, all points are connected by the
transparency of the courtyard walls, which
are composed of large frameless sheets of
glass. The pool occupies the heart of the
courtyard and the site, and everything is
positioned around it. Like House 2, sleeping
areas are upstairs and living downstairs.Berkley Dobson House, more modest
in scale, interrogates the courtyard type
by splitting it into two separate spaces.
Also positioned at the rear of a traditional
Victorian house – in this instance, an
attached double-fronted brick terrace –
this renovation turns the conventions of
the terrace on their head. Having entered
through the terrace’s original front door,
the visitor realizes that they are not yet in
an interior space. The central corridor of
the terrace is in fact part of a timber-lined
deck that continues deeper into the site
and the front door proper is not reached
until one has passed through the original
house and past a pond-lined courtyard.
The plan indicates a conscious attempt
to work with contrast and surprise, and
at the threshold to the interior the visitor2014Humble House
- BELLARINE PENINSULA, VIC •
arrives at the main living space. This has
a second courtyard beyond it, containing
a swimming pool on axis with the front
courtyard’s pond. In common with
House 3, the Berkley Dobson House looks
inward, but seems larger than it is by virtue
of the transparency of the internal walls
between courtyards. The space of this
house, along with many of the Coy Yiontis
houses, is simultaneously contained and
boundless. As Rosa says, the house is not
an object – “the block is the limit of the
designed space.”
Humble House is a departure from
the courtyard type but follows a similar
aesthetic schema, albeit with a different
planning strategy. It was designed for
an older couple who were transitioning
from a grand, bluestone homestead into