Writer’s House in Caulfield South by Branch Studio Architects.

The brief for Branch Studio Architects was to bring this house in Caulfield South into the 21st century, while nourishing its rich history and the people who made their lives there.

Located 10km south-east of Melbourne, Caulfield South is a suburb home to a diverse range of architectural styles from Edwardian weather-board to Californian Bungalow to Red & Orange clinker brick. Alarmingly, it is visually evident to see an increasing trend of these original housing styles being demolished to make way for large, two storey modern housing typologies. These are often conceived as mock – Neo-Georgian or rendered triple-fronted brick veneer.

Around the 1960’s and 70’s a number of European trained architects such as Ernest Fooks began designing a series of superb International Modern style inspired houses in and around the Caulfield and wider area. A protégé of Fook’s – Michael Richard Ernest Feldhagen also completed a number of exemplar International Modernist Style singular residences and multi-residential flats around the same period.

Writer’s House is an alteration and additional to an existing orange brick veneer residence that was originally designed in the late 1960’s by Michael R E Feldhagen. The house was originally built for the current occupants Grandparents who were Jewish holocaust survivors and immigrated to Australia a few years prior to building the house.

The house was filled with beautiful original custom joinery specifically built for the house by Jakob Rudowski – a local joiner who made quite a lot of furniture around the area in the 1960’s and 70’s. In 2013 – the grandparents passed away and due to the distress of this event for the clients, the house lay dormant for a good part of 2 and a half years.

“The first day we met with our clients was one of the few times they had come back to the house after losing their grandparents. This was obviously an emotional but somewhat therapeutic event – knowing that they were going to extend and celebrate the life of the Grandparents house through some extensive renovations,” explain the architects.

It was the joint intention of the client and the architects that new works would not impact on the original integrity of the original house and it’s memories. “There is often a very fine line between creating a nostalgic ‘museum’ of something that was AND removing all notion of the existing all together. Existing Wallpapers, Chandeliers and Building Fabric were kept where possible including the existing Rudowski Furniture which was restored.”

This existing fabric has been very carefully set in contrast with new contemporary furniture, joinery and materials, that reside as a background palette to highlight the existing and at the same time – celebrating the new. Both existing rear and front painted timber windows were replaced with full height steel windows that encompass the interior spaces with a rich warm light.

The project consisted of an extensive internal renovation and some external works. A new large ‘party’ deck bounded either side by two black aluminium perforated privacy screens not only solved a practical issue of overlooking but more importantly was used to extend the internal areas to create a much more flexible internal/external cohesion of space.

From street level, the existing front windows were replaced with thin steel, double-glazed windows. A minimal white colour scheme was applied to the existing stone and aluminium fascias. The colour black was used to celebrate existing formal structural lines. The existing orange bricks have been retained to maintain the house’s history and timeless glory.

[Images courtesy of Branch Studio Architects. Photography by Peter Clarke.]