2019 Beaconsfield House
Architectural Team: Simon Pendal, Stephen Neille
Builder: Kelly Building, Structural: Scott Smalley Partnership, Estimator: Ron Jessett, Photographer: Rob Frith
2021 AR House Awards - UK - Commendation (Top 6 Internationally)
2021 National AIA Eleanor Cullis-Hill Award For Residential Architecture - Houses (Alterations and Additions)
2021 AIA The Peter Overman Award For Residential Architecture - Houses (Alterations and Additions)
2021 Think Brick Australia - New Entrant Award
2021 Think Brick Australia - Horbury Hunt Residential - High Commendation
An existing 1940’s worker’s cottage has been given new life and extended. The original cottage was stripped-back and restored. Only subtle changes were made in plan to maintain its integrity. It has been treated on its merits as thin, modest and direct. There is beauty in its basic quality.
The new extension houses a breakfast room, second living room, main bedroom, w.c. and outdoor bathroom. The extension is best described as a series of cave-like chambers made from recycled brickwork. It feels weighty and its surfaces rustic. Openings have no ‘frame’ and as such appear primitive and hollowed-out of the building’s mass. Light from above enters in an orchestrated sequence giving the interior a soft glow and a sense of slow discovery. The final room in the sequence - the main bedroom - is an intense moment of immersion in colour and compressed scale.
The house is intended to engage in what Romano Guardini describes as a decisive nearness to nature. The breakfast room compresses and rises to meet the rising of the sun. Top-light guides the occupant through the internal sequence, changing intensity dependant on season and weather. The heavy-set primitive openings amplify the stillness of the interior, framing the ephemerality of garden and its seasonal shift. Breezes are invited within, especially on hot nights, to relieve and cool both house and body. Above the principal bedroom, a large skylight frames the night sky, the stars and amplifies an awareness of the lunar cycle. Bathing can occur outside in all conditions in contact with the garden.
