My next new personal project is to rebuild my home on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. The project is to retain the side and front walls of the current 1905 single fronted and single storey brick cottage into a three storey Hamptons style (please don’t yawn) rendered brick and timber clad home, including an internal single garage with car stacker and a roof terrace with beach views. The retention of the side and front walls is to maintain the existing side walls that are on or almost on the property boundaries and the front wall that is way in front of existing setbacks on the street. Without retaining these walls, the local council would never approve the proposed redevelopment.
I see this project as an opportunity to capture all of the learnings I have accumulated in my house renovations and builds to date. (There have been several!) This post is for me to capture my thoughts and experiences in one place and will be iterative (with me updating and re-posting until the build commences).
The COVID 19 Pandemic has wrought havoc with all our personal lives. It has also upended the World’s procurement supply chains. Any building project (in Sydney at least) will require a minimum 20 week procurement lead time, in addition to the local council development approval process. So, even though I am heading into two back to back HSC (Higher School Certificate) years with my children, I am planning my rebuild project in detail. I want to be ready to commence as soon as my children have graduated, with every last nail and tile procured and ready to commence by January, 2023. While that feels like a long time away, I know that it will pass in a flash.
An invisible garage door – A garage door that doesn’t look like a garage door
A single fronted house presents a huge design issue in incorporating a garage door. When you only have 5.2 metres of house frontage, a 2.4 metre wide expanse of Colorbond for a garage door will be overwhelming and seriously ugly.
Many architects working across the Globe with constrained frontages have designed creative solutions to narrow garaging. The best solution that I have found for my project is that designed by New Zealand architect Jonathan Smith, founder of Matter Architects. Jonathan worked with a cabinetmaker to deconstruct the frontage of an 1890s Auckland home to then assemble automatic doors and a moving fence to conceal a brand new garage space, all expertly retrofit into the historic structure.
A car stacker has also been used in this Auckland project, to transform single parking into double parking, at minimal cost, like this:
https://www.bendpak.com.au/car-hoists/parking-lifts/pl-6sr/
The sliding fence is also key to the solution, and is like this (but noting that this video is a tad long winded):
Rustle and Sway 