Hampton House by Kennedy Nolan Architects

Nobody involved in extending a 1938 clinker-brick home in Hampton wanted a single-room rear addition — not the architect, Patrick Kennedy from Kennedy Nolan Architects, nor the client. “We had that in Sydney,” the client says, “and it drove me insane with the TV and kitchen and everybody together in the one space.
“We wanted a central kitchen but a separate living space, where we could read without hearing the washing machine. “With two pre-teen daughters, “I like the idea of people having spaces to go to,” she says. Kennedy concurred. “We’ve always avoided that big, open-plan space because although they look nice, they are hard to live in.” Instead, he and design partner Rachel Nolan added a central corridor to the rear of what he calls “quite a modest house in a modest street”. A study/guest bedroom was added to one side and a simple living room “pavilion” to the other. The addition comprised the substantial use of glass, with white-painted, rough-textured brickwork and exposed Victorian ash beams and joinery. In its lines, it’s a nod to both Californian and Victorian modernism, an aesthetic admired by both architect and client. “It draws on the 1970s idea of the modernist tradition, which has a handmade quality,” Kennedy says, “and that’s nice in a domestic environment.”

Rather than knocking down the original clinker brick, which was one proposition floated by the client, the architects dexterously reconfigured the flow and function of the old rooms and tied the whole thing together with Victorian ash — in paneling, cupboards and beams — and flooring of a grey-stained travertine marble. This palette of materials sounds challenging in the context of a pre-World War II house yet it works on many levels, not only in meeting and matching the innate solidity and surface texture suggested by clinker brick but, Kennedy says, “it affects the acoustics. The rafters and the travertine break up the sound and you feel the solidity and tranquility on a psychological level. Silence is nice. I hate noisy houses. “It’s all beautiful, durable, textural material and, as with the timber that will deepen in colour, it all improves with age.”

Hampton House, Hampton, Australia, by Kennedy Nolan Architects
via: Sydney Morning Herald

Friday, October 15th, 2010

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