2024 Gallery

This exemplary home disrupts the well-trodden path of adaptations to a familiar housing type. It resists the temptation to expand and enlarge, instead containing all that is needed for a family of four in the footprint of the existing worker’s cottage.

Rather than consolidating rooms into one open-plan setting, it preserves the intimate scale of the home’s existing rooms and introduces carefully placed openings in walls to permit connection and supervision as required. And rather than internalising all domestic space behind a defensive wall, it introduces a loose-fit room, intentionally free of program, that is open to both the garden and the street, enabling the house to converse with the neighbourhood. Now used as a workplace for the occupants’ architecture studio, this shady outdoor room – ideally suited to the Brisbane climate – could readily be used for informal living. A large portion of the site is retained for garden.

Architects’ own homes are often sites of experimentation – an opportunity to challenge “business as usual” thinking. Here, inspired by the shophouse, the architect-owners have explored how work and family life can practically coexist, while also occupying distinct zones of the house. The entry – serving house and studio – is moved away from the busy main road and onto the quieter side street, preserving domestic privacy; porosity is graded from the steel mesh-lined public-facing entry circulation to the cocooning bedrooms upstairs; robust concrete and steel in the undercroft give way to beautifully finished timber in private spaces.

In opting to stay within the existing footprint, in exploring ways that a private domestic space can engage with the neighbourhood, and in adopting a loose-fit, long-life ethos that supports the happy coexistence of work and domestic life, the architects have reframed the house without eradicating the qualities of the original. Confident yet understated and exquisitely resolved, Red Hill House and Studio is an exceptional example of the potency of doing less. It is deservingly named the 2024 Australian House of the Year.