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The vision for ‘Blue House’ was to create an expressive home that could celebrate its past, while confidently setting it up for the future.
‘The house had such a rich and interesting history, being a former pub, a pair of terraces, and eventually a family home,’ Sibling Architecture co-director Nicholas Braun says.
Having already served as the client’s home for many years prior, the owners had a strong emotional attachment for the property, despite its quirks and the fragmented layout that had evolved across several iterations and different decades.
Now, it needed to evolve once again to become a cohesive multigenerational family home.
Sibling Architecture approached the renovation as ‘editors’, carving out spaces where a mother and her two adult children could live independently, while enjoying the closeness that comes with living under one roof.
‘We retained much of the home’s existing structural framework but undertook significant spatial reconfiguration,’ Nicholas says.
They also worked around the house’s existing bold features to incorporate the striking checkerboard flooring, exposed steelwork, fireplaces, and original volumes into the improved floor plan.
But the eye-catching blue façade was never in question. ‘It’s the namesake of the house and its most iconic identifier within the local streetscape,’ Nicholas says. ‘Rather than diminish that identity, we saw the interiors as an opportunity to amplify and play off the energy that exterior already radiates.’
This prompted them to embrace colour as the ‘glue’ of the project — using it not just decoratively, but architecturally, to define various spaces without altering the residence structurally.
Plush green carpet replaced the mismatched timber floors, as new marigold and sunbaked paint colours were introduced in a nod to the warm tones of the Australian landscape.
‘We also referenced hospitality design in our approach to threshold moments, like using bold tiles at entry points to mark spatial shifts at the left over level changes, echoing the building’s pub history,’ Nicholas adds.
‘Instead of homogenising the house, we gave those awkward aspects a sense of belonging.’
For Sibling Architecture, Blue House is a great reminder of how residential architecture doesn’t need to start from a blank slate to feel cohesive and contemporary. Sometimes, all it takes is a bit of creativity.
