Amazing Design: Keeping it small and special

Modest size, enormous outcome 

In this day and age, what do you do if you’ve got a dirty little secret and it goes global? If the unmentionable pops out of the box for the world to see? 

Do you go to ground; pretend it hasn’t happened, stay calm and soldier on; put on a brave face and own it; or, do you admit you’ve lost your way and work really hard to address and fix it?  

The latter’s surely the only option for our national ‘dirty little home secret’, revealed years ago and which we’ve failed to adequately address since: that we continue to build the largest houses in the world. 

With the average floor area of new homes climbing to a staggering 266.2 square metres (confirmed by the ABS in 2012-13), we deserve to be internationally pilloried. As architect Viv Marston of Marston Architects says: “In my practice, clients are always wanting bigger, bigger, bigger homes.”

Fortunately, Marston, along with a number of other architects and a growing cohort of homeowners, is pushing back, being more concerned with experimenting with how small a house can be and still function well. They may salvage our international reputation yet. 

Brief

Marston’s clients were downsizing from a large family home in Castle Cove to relocate to Redfern, their plans taking a sharp detour when they spotted an idyllically located seaside property in Fairlight. 

Keen to reduce their footprint, they purchased the site together with another couple, close lifelong friends. The plan: to build two new separate Torrens title homes on site (in the process, halving the cost of the land and reducing construction costs).  

They wanted to explore how small a home they could live in comfortably. It needed to be something with zero maintenance, with good access to light, ventilation and views. 

Challenges

Primarily, how to maximise solar gain on a steeply sloping south-facing block. 

Design  

Marston has created two three-bedroom homes of modest size – not tiny but much more in keeping with homes built pre-McMansion – that boast the most captivating sense of space and generosity.

Applying extraordinary attention to detail, a creative design, and very clever planning, each 185-square-metre home feels immensely larger, enjoying maximum light, ventilation and connection to both northern and southern aspects, without any compromise to privacy. 

“Every design decision was driven by how to maximise the feeling of space.”

Responding to the site, each home is designed as a ‘cascading series of saw-toothed forms’, logically tumbling with the contour of the block and maximising its potential. Diving to the water below, each simultaneously drags in light from above at every opportunity. North-facing high windows and skylights feature on all three saw-toothed forms, or pavilions; rooves tip to the north and south to maximise light; spaces open to a light-filled central courtyard; and full-height sliding doors abound.  

Marston has worked ‘to keep the (material) palette really small’ to accentuate the sense of space and light, to ensure the environmental sustainability of materials, and achieve zero maintenance. 

“There’s no paint in the house at all. Inside walls and ceilings are in white stucco, waxed stucco venezia, and outside walls are sealed.”

Again to maximise space, the slimmest sliding doors are used (Vitrocsa from Switzerland), the slimmest steel structural frame, slimmest steel handrail, slim-line timber battening, the most economical wardrobe system (FEG from Italy) – and on it goes throughout, with everything designed to appear ‘tall and slim’. 

Also key to the design was the architects’ experimentation with the idea that every element have more than one function. An elegant timber screen conceals the kitchen when necessary, ensuring it does not dominate the living space, while also acting as a light fitting at night – allowing the masked kitchen to glow as a lantern at night.

Modest size, enormous outcome. Now that’s the sort of secret we need to go viral.