Dec
One House Two Homes Mt Gravatt
Project Review
Hello, my name’s Jan Hogarth from PlaceMate Architects, and today I’d like to review the One House Two Homes Mt Gravatt new building project that was completed just in time for the Christmas holiday. We are home renovation and residential new build specialist architects in Brisbane. I’ve been doing this for 30 years.
Now, the first thing to know about this home is it is for a multi-generational family home-building project. This is an unobtrusive family enclave situated in an ordinary Brisbane suburban street. There are three generations of the same family living on the same street. This is the third house the family has built on the street. They love living separately together. In reality, the family is very unassuming. They are the absolute opposite of showy. They like a lot of privacy and they like to be quite restrained.
The brief was a modern home in the style of the classic Queenslander homestead found in outback Australia.
BEFORE Side entry mid-construction
And, of course, I said, “We will I’ll give it a go.” So we made the lines classic, like a homestead. And one thing you’ll notice is you can’t see onto the upstairs verandah. That’s a big deal for the family. Behind the facade is a five-bedroom four-bathroom home with a double lock-up garage. Now, what’s interesting about this? This house is designed for two members of the family to live there separately together.
In this case, the occupants are two brothers. If you look closely you’ll see that there are two entries to two separate courtyards. One on the left side, and one on the right side. The right-hand side goes up to the unit at the rear of the building. The left-hand side goes down to a townhouse at the back that’s even quieter and calming and restrained.
A private low-maintenance bushland garden
AFTER Side entry upon completion
This is the courtyard view as you come down on the right-hand side and features a lovely bushland garden. And then you go up the stairs to the unit at the top. And this is our presentation drawing that we did right at the beginning of how that upper apartment would look. It’s just a shot of the kitchen, living room, nice big veranda, and high ceilings. Oh, these people are all really, really tall.
That’s the other thing. They’re all like six foot five. It’s like a family of basketball players. So the scale is important to them. They feel contained in a normal-sized house. So we had to take that on board.
Now if you walk down this door, you’d go through a little study, you could open another door and that would connect up the other part of the house. But they can be separate or together. One could be a residence and the other one might be a rental property. Over time, it’s possible that one of them might move into the entire house as they get older and perhaps they have a family. Who knows!
One House Two Homes Mt Gravatt project
The One House Two Homes Mt Gravatt project is designed for that flexibility. Okay, so that’s it with One House Two Homes Mt Gravatt!
That was our picture, all well and good. And if you were our client, and we did a drawing like that, we could do what we did with these guys and turn that into a video walkthrough. So anyone who can’t read a plan to save their lives and has no idea of the scale will get a sense of what this space is like, which was a huge relief if you’re six foot five. And this is how it turned out.
So, there’s the little kitchen, there’s the veranda. It’s got privacy from the street. They can sit there and can’t, people from walking down the street walking their dog can’t tell. But it’s got this cracking view out to the northeast.
BEFORE The shell of the house is built
So a great aspect as well. Ah, now this is the shot of our presentation for the lower floor of the townhouse. And you come in here and you can go upstairs and there’s two bedrooms and a study upstairs and this way faces north, so it all opens out. Now, this had to be a very calm space to suit the guy who’s going to be living here. And this is how it turned out.
So, it’s not a million miles away. It still has a retro feel that is going to be lasting. These are the colours they selected. And it’s got the classic polished concrete floor, fairly neutral kitchen. And if you believe it, he’s in his 20s, that’s how tidy it is. So there are children like that in the world.
We loved this challenging One House Two Homes Mt Gravatt project!
It was challenging from a design perspective with quite a complicated brief within a standard brief.
DURING Construction as design emerges.
We created that flexibility, different zones of the house all working for privacy, but we’re really happy with it. For one, the owner’s happy, too, because the building costs came in pretty much on budget and on time, considering the boom time that it was.
The guys who live here love it, too, because it just suits them, and they calm down and feel at home and relax, and it’s just a beautiful place. We’ve deliberately made the style of this quite neutral and kind of retro, so it future proofs it from not going out of fashion In 20 years’ time. The bones of this house are still good. It can be painted other colours, it will look great.
So that’s it. And that’s why people hire an architect, because you get that customized design, that lasting value. We’re across all that. See another home in this series Mt Gravatt Modern Home.
AFTER One House Two Homes Mt Gravatt
We put them in touch with a really awesome builder because we know heaps of them, and that’s what architects do.
That’s what we do as a business.
We’re PlaceMate Architects. If you have a project that’s coming up that needs a bit of thought and consideration to get lasting value, request a site visit through our website, and we can have a chat. We’re a small team working in St. Lucia throughout the greater Brisbane area. We design houses and renovations for homeowners.
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