2021 Gallery
Winner: New House over 200 square metres
Studio Bright for 8 Yard House
Interrupting the procession of terrace house facades, 8 Yard House is a street-healing gesture, while staying true to its own time and purpose. This new house for a large family on a double-fronted site in North Fitzroy reflects our ongoing desire to prioritise outdoor spaces as much as indoor.
Jury Citation
8 Yard House builds on centuries-old traditions of spaces for living outside. The courtyard is reinterpreted as eight outdoor rooms, which punctuate a dense house across a double-fronted lot in an inner-urban area of Melbourne. This outside space – sometimes yard, sometimes courtyard – is brought right to the facade, creating a deep and generous threshold to the house and offering transparency to the street through hit-and-miss brickwork.
Carefully detailed brickwork and relationships between the house and its courtyards, which are distributed along the length of the site, bring a looseness to the otherwise solid brick enclosure and restrained material palette. An unusual spatial richness is achieved through subtle variation in the stepped section, shifting room orientation and allowing adjacent rooms to borrow light and aspect from one another.
The outdoor spaces are rooms of equal value to their interior counterparts. Their interconnectedness layers a diversity of activity and inhabitation throughout the site. Crafted domestic moments and material celebration are dedicated to niches, corners and walls. This house invites a rich life.
