Shelly House

Home, adaptive reuse / 2023

Spec

Kind: home, adaptive reuse

Completed: 2023

While many 50-year old houses are demolished for the convenience of a fresh start, the retention of 80% of the existing building fabric was a sensitive use of resources to add another 50+ years to the life of this building.

The aim was to preserve the physical traces of memories attached to the building while updating the plan to stay relevant to an evolving family over three generations with the addition of a kids room and a bathroom, and a renovation of the kitchen, main bathroom and deck.

Adapting an existing building is the most resourceful option when it is available, extending a building's life, amortizing it's original embodied impact over a longer timespan, embedding intergenerational memory into a place and fostering connectedness and continuity.

Precise interventions and small extensions transform the existing plan into expansive and warm spaces. The design interventions celebrate the relaxed mid-century modernist architecture.

The island-cupboards delineate areas and provide functional storage while blending the spaces together at the edges into a larger whole, increasing the sense of spaciousness in what is a relatively small floor plan.

The new sliding door to the outdoor living area was made with an incision into what was a solid wall. The children love opening both sliding doors to run around the corner of the building like a racing track. This undercover outdoor living area is used for play, barbecueing and dumping all the stuff that comes back from a trip to the beach or a dive.

The removal of the front and rear fences is a small but radical act, softening the edge with the street and inviting wildlife to wander into the garden to graze, lounge and roam freely without barrier.