How to Restore an Old Home to a Modern Home Using Concrete (House Tour)

The most enjoyable aspect of this profession to me is to see how greater impact it can have on someone's life. It's truly exhilarating and it's wonderful to come back here and to see the vision that I had now come to life. The suburb it's built in is East Bower, Maine, which has very high densities compared to the rest of Sydney. It got a certain charm in terms of the various different styles that are evident in the neighbourhood. We love the lifestyle. It's a real village area and of course being surrounded by water it's a beautiful place to live. So we always knew that we wanted to move to Bower, Maine. We just knew that it was probably an area we could move in when our kids left home. The brief for the project had two components to it. The first being the restoration of a very charming old sandstone cottage. And the second component was adding a significant amount of new floor space to the back of the property. So the new roof forms on this new pavilion, I mean there's sort of subtle sort of distortions of the traditional roof form of the old cottage. When we bought it, it was very run down and I think that's what drew us to it. So we completely restored the front of the cottage and then did some extensive restoration in the cottage itself. Very small, tight little site, so I think the design has brought the light through this building in some amazing ways. We had dinner here the other night with the architect. The owners invited us to sort of have a little celebration and it's just such a nice house to be in. Considering it's hard tiles, bricks, concrete, it has a really soft and warm feeling about it still. From a design point of view, I'm most proud of how intricate the building is. It's got an incredible diversity of spaces and each of them have their own sort of particular sort of character. Some of the houses we've built really have a feeling about them that sometimes isn't evident on the drawings. There's some concrete details in here that are pretty incredible. There's a lot of angles, acute and obtuse corners. We had to be quite considerate in what we chose to do and how we attacked the different sequencing and it worked out really well. It's a work of art really. I think it's better than what we thought it was. It's a huge risk when you build. You know it's your dreams, your aspirations and a hell of a lot of money that you put into it. And you're having to communicate that with your architect and your builder. But we think we got more than what we ever expected to. We entered this house in the Master Builders Excellence in Housing Awards in 2018 which we were lucky enough to win the award for the category. In addition to that we actually won the Master Builders Young Builder of the Year award. We were very proud of ourselves to be nominated at least and then to actually win made me feel quite proud of what we've been able to achieve here. I think what we love about the house though is that we keep finding new things that we love. You know it's the sort of house that opens up to you over a long period of time. So lots of friends come over and say oh wow I didn't see this last time and I think that's a sign of a good design and a good build where you don't see it all at once. You've got to go searching. You know it's all come out really very much how I imagined. You know that had a lot to do with finding a client that you can work very well with, obviously finding a builder you can work very well with. Good space is a gift that keeps on giving.