A Courtyard House That Brings the Garden Into Every Room House Tour

We often described cloaked house as being a radical renovation and it's a term that we've come up with in the practice to describe a type of design process and building where essentially you keep the major structural elements but you completely reimagine the interior. It's a really amazing way to honour the original work and time that has gone into making buildings but make sure that they can function and be made to suit contemporary life. My name is Jennifer McMaster and I'm a founding director at Trias and I was also the lead project architect on Cloaked House. Cloaked House is located in Mossman in Sydney. It's a really beautiful, quite idyllic Sydney suburb that has a lot of remnant bush and so it's very leafy, very quiet, kind of wake up in the morning to the sound of birdsong and it's also nestled into Sydney Harbour and so you get these beautiful glimpses of the beach, the surrounding sky and the ocean. The home had been built in the 1960s by an owner-builder so it had all of these really incredible mid-century modern elements but it was also incredibly run down and so because of that the clients assumed that we'd need to knock the house down and build it again. But when we first came to site we all found something in the home that we loved. It had a charm, it had a spirit to it that we all wanted to find a way to keep. The other thing that happened was around about the time we started the project a neighbour who happened to grow up in the house came by and gave us a photo album that documented the original house under construction and so we had this incredible album of family memories actually showing the original building being built and there was something about seeing that album and all of the love and care that had gone into the original building that also made us all think that the right thing to do was to keep the house and to give it another lease on life so that it could have another chapter in its story. The first thing that's really notable about this house is it doesn't actually have a carport or garage. It originally did but we removed it as part of the renovation works so when you first come to the home you're not blocked by any structures, you're greeted by this really beautiful delicate native garden that we share with the street. So there's immediately this sense of generosity and welcome that we tried to cultivate from the very first moment that you step on site with this project. Walking to the front door you have the experience of opening it up and immediately being revealed with the house which when you enter is where you see the void that cuts through the centre of the floor plan and also look out onto the balcony and the view of the distant trees beyond and then moving inside the first room is an open plan kitchen living dining room. So the kitchen has an island bench, this beautiful timber table that everyone can gather around and share snacks and meals or talk about their day. The dining table is anchored in the centre of the floor plan and it looks out to the north. We get to look out into the tree canopy, watch the birds, watch the shifting sun and the distant water. Moving downstairs to the second level you kind of come down a timber staircase and walk through an internal courtyard garden. And the garden is at the centre of the home and at the centre of the floor plan for a number of reasons. So first of all it is in the heart of the home, it's a place that everything pinwheels around and so when you move through the house you're always moving through this really beautiful internal garden. It's a place where you can look up into the sky, look up into the trees and also get to kind of experience this exultant double height volume as you move through the house. Then moving through the first floor we have a series of bedrooms facing north and all of those bedrooms have access to a north facing balcony. So it's a really lovely spot where you can go and sit outside, be covered in the rain and experience the really beautiful outlook that we have on the side. We're really big believers in our practice in this idea of We see homes as a chance to showcase how we can be more sustainable but also still achieve really exceptional architectural outcomes and Cloaked House is a really strong embodiment of these two ideals operating together. It's passively designed so you can open up the doors, you can get fresh breezes through, natural light penetrates the whole home so it feels really bright and open and welcoming. We kept so much of the original structure that we were able to save considerable amounts of embodied carbon in making that decision and yet it looks and feels like a completely new home. The thing that I'm most proud of ultimately with this project is that we were able to keep the existing building and honour its story and that has all of these incredible implications for the work that we do as architects. I think we're really familiar as designers and architects and clients even at looking at a building that has a lot of charm and that has a lot of beauty and keeping that and restoring it and then maybe adding on to it. What's really unique about this building is that it was a bit of an ugly duckling. It was a building that was really run down and really needed a lot of love and a lot of care in order to bring it back to life and I'm really proud of the fact that we saw an opportunity in keeping the building because it's a far more interesting and imaginative and exciting project I think because we were able to adapt and be resourceful with what we found.