Union Road Home / Prior Barraclough

Union Road Home / Prior Barraclough

Textual content description offered by the architects. The Union Road Home is an extension to the rear of a single-fronted, absolutely connected employees’ cottage in Northcote. It was designed for a pair coming into retirement who have been downsizing and needed to maneuver nearer to town. The extension accommodates a kitchen, eating, and dwelling space on the bottom ground and a examine on a first-floor mezzanine.

The structure of the extension is outlined by an articulated floor that consolidates and conceals all ancillary capabilities and envelops a beneficiant inside. Conceived as a responsive medium, the floor shrink wraps a staircase, leisure unit, kitchen, and moist areas, utilizing a easy and exact set of folds. In so doing, it capabilities not solely as an infrastructural armature but in addition as a circulatory and generative aspect, directing inner motion, defining zones throughout the inside, and framing views of the yard and sky.

Along with reconciling inner pressures and useful concerns, the floor additionally responds to the exterior atmosphere, tilting down in the direction of the yard to empty rainwater into an underground tank and accommodate a big array of photo voltaic tiles. Internally, the inclined ceiling works in parallel with the group of the plan, providing spatial definition to an in any other case open quantity. The low portion of the ceiling aligns with the widest a part of the plan to create an intimate and subdued dwelling house, whereas the eating, kitchen, and examine are progressively extra animated because the plan narrows and the ceiling approaches its dramatic excessive level.

The singular materiality of the floor, lined in Australian hardwood, is articulated by a strict and constant grid of expressed joints, which via their repetition conceal all operability to supply a sense of intrigue and shock because the floor is unfolded to disclose its underlying capabilities. To emphasise the programmatic shift, secondary areas are lined in supplies that present a stark counterpoint to the texture and element of the timber, equivalent to stainless-steel within the kitchen and glazed mosaic tiles in moist areas.

The structure of this undertaking is rigorously calibrated to synthesize a spread of competing concerns right into a singular, coherent kind. The result’s each useful and gestural, offering a excessive diploma of amenity in addition to spatial drama and intrigue.