Integrating Interior & Exterior Spaces: 8 Yard House in North Fitzroy by Studio Bright.

Designed by Studio Bright, 8 Yard House is a large family home with a heritage overlay. Located on a double fronted site in North Fitzroy, the house is punctuated with eight functional outdoor rooms — marking the project particularly unique.

For the design team, outdoor space is as much of a priority as the indoor one as they explore the built structure beyond the interior. Rather than have one singular backyard and the bulk of the house as one mass, the planning and spaces are distributed along the length of the site, pierced with a series of variously sized outdoor courtyards.

Set on a relatively narrow plot of land, the team took advantage of the northern light while in turn strengthening the connection of each internal space to the garden. To counter the linear site, bisecting divisions were introduced to correct room proportions and to shift spatial orientation.

The new two-storey four-bedroom house looked to the surrounding heritage streetscape to inform the façade. The cream brick of the former structure was recycled to form the new exterior as heritage notes are recalled through contemporary application — a nod to the neighbouring period Victorian homes. The brick surface softens and dissolves from a referenced formal composition to a more ambiguous receding curved hit-and-miss screen element, while still holding on to material continuity.

The linear extrusion is transformed into a chain of elements each claiming its own outside space. The divisions march uninterrupted through the external skin to become courtyard defining garden walls. By applying the streetscape rhythm to parts of its proportions, the street façade seeks to empathise with the context while addressing the disruptive site width.

Front cellular rooms, echoing adjoining terrace patterns, straddle either side of a passage. Further back into the site, principal living spaces are displaced along the boundary in sequence, progressively more private in nature. The pool is at the front, with its play of water-reflected light calming arrivals. This also relieves the rear garden, allowing the lounge room an expansive outlook and a spacious backyard area for kids to play.

The lounge room is stepped down and terminates the linear room array, bringing the level of seated repose down to the garden surface. Eight yard spaces hang off the rooms. Their functions specialise along the lines of the spaces they adjoin and offer a diversity of outdoor enjoyments; cooking, eating, swimming, sunny repose, leafy outlook, city views. Clues of visual continuity, such as wall height datums and surface finish, work to break down distinctions between inside and out.

Kids bedrooms in dormitory format consume the upstairs area. The sunny north-oriented passage space has bigger ambitions than just access, however. Punctuated by the same bisecting divisions as below and edged with built-in seating and linked study booths, the
light-filled space seeks to draw kids out of their lairs, advocating sibling interaction above the solitary screen activities that may dominate while communal washing arrangements reinforce this social ideal.

Related: Ruckers Hill House in Melbourne by Studio Bright.

[Images courtesy of Studio Bright. Photography by Rory Gardiner.]