introducing Seatondale

We have been working on the schematic design for a heritage house in Sydney, called "Seatondale".

The building history could be tracked back to 1815, and several important people have owned the property.

The client is looking to renovate the existing heritage house, and add 2 new dwellings to the rear of the heritage house....our task is, "how?"

With 3 dwellings on the same land, there is inherent issues on privacy, overlooking, and overshadowing to address.  Easiest is probably to build a wall around the dwellings to isolate them from each other.....but then, there is no interaction, and no benefit for them to be next to each other.  It is a rare situation to have 3 dwellings on the same land, of course we should make something interesting out of it!

So the idea is, "garden as the sharing, buffer zone between the dwellings." - ok this is still rough, there will be many more refinements to come along the design process... - rather than using fences to block each other out, we started exploring ways to screen and borrow views to expand the imaginative boundary whilst maintaining the privacy of individual dwellings.

we first looked at off-setting the building volumes from the heritage building articulation. Down side is access and overlooking.

We then tried to reduce building bulk by building smaller (but more) volumes, so the dwellings become part of the landscape - but the building appeared bulkier at standing height, and overshadowing was aggravated (this is like the 10th scheme already...)

..............So.............

So we decided to go simple - minimise building footprints, orientate to face the sun (and away from each other) to improve building amenities

We will get busy on this project in 2011, hopefully I can tell you more about it soon!