Bearing the brunt of the afternoon sun is the home's new Victorian ash siding.
After more than ten years in a 930-square-foot house in Melbourne’s inner suburb of Brunswick East, Paul and Margaret Mazur—as well as their two kids and Margaret’s mother—simply needed more room. The extra 900 square feet of living space and a luminous courtyard designed by the architecture firm Bloxas fit the bill nicely with their warm wooden material palette and a clear agenda of sustainability.
The real aesthetic trick though, isn’t on the inside but on the western exterior. Here, a facade and fence wrought from hardy, inexpensive, local timber provides a bit of privacy for the residents while cutting an arresting streetside figure. It looks as though the addition itself has been halved down the middle, leaving a flat, striated section on view to the neighbors. According to architect Anthony Clarke, the series of boards are little trouble to replace, will patina over the years, and offer a nod to Brunswick East’s industrial past, but with, as he puts it, “a softer, more humane touch and scale.”
