Little OG

Little OG is an experiment in living. The unique challenges of the site, with a small south-facing Victorian cottage wedged inside a tiny row houses, are responded to inventively. A dissolving courtyard and abundance of light creates a home that can expand and contract, wrenching it into the 21st century.

• The interiors lead form
• First principle to chase natural daylight.
• These inform a poetic totality of materiality, exacting design detail and repetition of structural expression.

The spatial plan narrative which influenced form retains front rooms, then creates a central courtyard allowing transformative light penetration, redistributing upper level form centrally. Ceiling heights rake down holistically – bedroom to bathroom (upper) to kitchen (lower). The innovation challenge was to detail the central courtyard to completely dissolve away, LITERALLY the essence of indoor-outdoor, through a series of sliding and stacking doors that move completely out of the way, creating one beautifully generous space. The verdant courtyard landscaping together with highlight windows reinforce connection to both immediate and borrowed landscape on this compact site.

With sustainability a key consideration, timber becomes the defining materiality, an opportunity to express local construction that has beauty and warmth, expertly crafted joists and beams working together with Australian timber finishes to floors, windows, doors and joinery. Furnishings and styling equally important; Australian local furniture design is showcased as are local ceramicists and artists. The kitchen with its’ clerestory dictated light from all sides, and the stair features open timber-treads hung on steel rods to maximise the flow of space.

• Through rigour of planning yet spatial generosity, rooms are compact yet combining, more than the sum of its parts.
• Through materiality and light, poetics results

Most critical was the sequence of spaces and how you enter / exit them; A linear open-tread stair, circulation aligned to the east, rooms flow inwards in parallel, maximising spatial flow, utility, furniture placement and daylight.

The design responds poetically to the brief, informed by neuropsychology, place and memory, with expressed repetition of structure and timber elements and even timber-detailed furniture creating a prompt for connection to place.

The brief; turn a tiny one-bedroom south-facing mid-row terrace into a home to both accommodate the semi-retired client alone, AND host her adult children and new grandchild on stays from abroad. The design goes beyond this remit. The middle bathroom surreptitiously steals robe space from the front guest/study, creating acoustically separate “guest wing”, preserving space for a courtyard and spatially generous kitchen aligned to the rear, solving daylight. A porch and “shed” accessed from the lane maximises storage. Upstairs the main bedroom opens to the courtyard AND a sunny compact east-facing terrace - a small garden to complement the courtyard AND a discreet place to dry clothes.