Tower House by Andrew Maynard Architects // Alphington, Victoria.

Australian architect Andrew Maynard has doubled the size of a house by adding a row of skinny gabled buildings, intended to make the building look like a small village rather than a monolithic block. Located in Alphington, a suburb north-east of Melbourne, the house was no longer big enough to suit the needs of its residents – a couple with two eight-year-old twin sons.

The brief was to create a residence that brings together community, art and nature. The architect came up with a design for a cluster of volumes that could be mistaken for a group of small buildings, like a village and named it Tower House. “Tower House is anti-monolith – it is village externally and a home internally,” explained Maynard. “The house defies logic as the exterior appears to be a series of small structures, while internally the spaces and functions are large and connected. Like the Tardis, it’s small on the outside and large internally.”

The original house is a single-storey structure built using red brick and dark-painted weatherboarding. Rather than copying this, Maynard chose to add wooden shingles to the gable ends of the new blocks, while ridged metal wraps around the sides and over the roof.

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So Hot Right Now // Scale Shingles In Architecture & Design.

[Images courtesy of Andrew Maynard Architects. Photography by Peter Bennetts Studio.]