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A simple brief to add a mud room and revise a misaligned floor plan in this Edwardian home in Malvern took on a life of its own after LANDE Architects stepped in.
‘The client asked if there was a better way to arrange the kitchen, dining, living, and it snowballed (in the best way) from there,’ says LANDE Architects director Lachlan McArdle.
‘They quickly became fully invested in bettering their home and how it would make them much more comfortable, both now and into the future.’
The new addition features a sunken dining room that sits between the house and landscape, letting the eye travel from the living room straight to the window overlooking the garden.
‘It was impossible, given the width of the home, to stack all three [spaces] across the rear elevation, so one had to shift,’ Lachlan explains.
‘Lamenting this direct connection to the garden, we decided to sink the dining space to visually subside beneath the view line from the living room. So, when you’re sitting on the couch (or if the owners like you — the BassamFellows armchairs), you look out over the dining room to the garden.’
Inserting the sunken dining room proved challenging thanks to the site’s location on a flood overlay. The solution was to create a ‘bunker’ — where the top of the concrete shell sits higher than the flood level — to receive proper council approval to lower the floor.
Upstairs, the footprint remains the same but sees an underused living space reworked into a bedroom, maximising both space and function.
‘[This project] is a special one for us, the first that really captures both our architecture and interiors,’ says LANDE Architects director Ellie Spinks.
A walk through the home’s interior reveals a warm, restrained palette of timber, rusted tones and tactile stone.
Moving outside, the larger-than-life outdoor fireplace acts as a structural and visual bookend to the renovation, and also supports the pergola.
‘It’s an anchor for an outdoor living space, and brings dynamism to the home throughout the year,’ Ellie explains.
It would have been easy for LANDE Architects to mimic the original Edwardian features of this home, but instead, they let its character evolve.
‘The facade recedes into its leafy Malvern street, expressive but not showy, and the palette carries the home’s history forward rather than copying it.’
