W
hat happens when owners and architects enter into a
“conversation” with a mid-century modern home? In
1949, Dr Edith Emery (1909–2004), an Austrian émigré
and polymath (she was a physician, teacher, linguist,
writer, traveller and artist), embarked on training and a new career
in architecture. From the late 1950s she designed various buildings,
including a house in Tasmania for her family (1958). Located on
a hillside in Sandy Bay, overlooking Hobart’s Derwent estuary,
Emery’s house was designed in a modernist mode, embracing the
movement’s rationalist and humanist dimensions. Logics of site,
plan, material and construction framed light, bright, warm and,
importantly, affordable spaces for living. A butterfly roof gave it a
figurative uplift.
In 2005, new owners made Emery’s house their home. While
the couple is committed to the house’s modernist design, they
needed the mores and constraints of the 1950s addressed. They
commissioned Hobart architects Poppy Taylor and Mat Hinds of
Taylor and Hinds Architects to rework the home for their young
family, including adding more space.
Crucial to the success of this project is the “fit” between the
family’s brief and the ethos of the original house in terms of
ambitions, aesthetics and affordability. Poppy and Mat approached
the project by studying Emery’s original drawings and closely
observing the logic of the building as a source of possibilities for
the new architecture. Their investigation was at the level of ideas
and their approach establishes a dialogue with the old, without
compromising the originality and idiosyncrasy of the new.
Taylor and Hinds Architects used the circulation spine of the
original dwelling to organize the new work – comprising a laundry,
bathroom and additional living space – along the eastern edge of the
site and, in the process, created an enclosed garden court. Within
the existing house, living spaces were reworked by pushing the
kitchen across the spine into a former bedroom and opening it to
make a generous, light-filled living space. At the transition from the
living room to the new work, the flooring changes from timber to
waxed concrete. A back door, an open laundry and a bathroom are
on the left and a short hallway languidly steps up the contours of
the site to the new multipurpose “garden” living room. It combines
a space for study, play and entertaining with a full wall that opens
onto the brick terrace of the new garden court. The addition is
modest in size and was built for roughly half the cost of most current
02 The original modernist
butterfly roof gives the
light and bright house
a figurative lift.architect-designed homes, yet its placement, adaptability and robust
and refined finishes have a maximal impact on the working of the
house: indoor and outdoor living areas are effectively doubled, with
space for the family to live at ease, all within a small footprint.
The conversation between Emery and the architects is especially
revealed in the garden court. The scale of the addition is attuned
to the intimacy of family life within the garden court and
counterpoised against the openness of the hillside location. The
brick garden terrace soon registers as a fold of the stepped brick
plinth upon which the house sits. The roof line of the new work
follows the contours of the site, incorporating a kick that resonates
with the butterfly roof of the original house. Battened wall sheeting
painted white and dark timber window reveals invert the material
strategy of the original dark-stained walls and white-framed
windows. Old and new reciprocate or, as Poppy and Mat describe
it, the new work is an extension of the original architecture rather
than simply an addition to it.
Internally, white spaces are accentuated by timber joinery and
detailing. The new kitchen is defined by blackwood veneer joinery
that wraps the space and folds from the wall to the bench. On the
eastern wall, in front of an existing window, a timber-framed bench
invites one to sit in front of the view. Hung from the ceiling, it
speaks directly to the original window frame. In the garden living
room, the timber of a shutter folds into a low bench seat.
Places in the view are important in this house. When it was
her home, Emery would sit in the front room (her studio, now the
main bedroom) looking out over the River Derwent and the city
of Hobart. Now, in the garden living room, a window seat is canted
out from the eastern wall, recreating an intimate place to sit
with the vast view, bringing past, present (and future) lives of the
house together.
Edith Emery is little known in architectural circles and one of the
added delights of Poppy and Mat’s design is how their engagement
with her work brings her architectural career into focus. For Emery,
being an architect involved “tying you to people, allowing you to
make them happier, their lives fuller, let them find contentment
because of a house which suited their lifestyle, temperament and
purse.” (Edith Emery, A Twentieth Century Life: An Autobiography.)
These are the values that Taylor and Hinds Architects has artfully
reinterpreted for this family home in Hobart.02