Aug
Jan Hogarth, principal of PlaceMate Architects explains how a seamless Queenslander carport addition creates a natural extension to enhance your existing home.
https://youtu.be/V7EcSccMGNo=0
Seamless Queenslander Carport Addition – It’s Complicated!
Here’s a question I get asked all the time, “How do I put a double lock-up garage on the street on my Queenslander in a character area?”
Short answer, you can’t get a double lockup garage on the street on a Queenslander! A carport is as close as you can get. It’s really a complicated question!
So I’ll just go through this so that you don’t have to phone me up! You can just look at this. So this is a lived-in building underneath. It’s a Queenslander. For the property value, you want the little Queenslander house to have the little matching Queenslander carport. How hard can it be? This is how hard. For a start, you can’t do a double lockup garage. That by definition has four closed walls.
Under the Brisbane City Plan, you can only have two closed walls. Here’s an example of a seamless Queenslander carport addition. You can have a closed wall here that is a roller door. The bit that’s touching the house, it’s closed. This house is a carport because it has two open sides. Now, if it’s on the boundary, that counts as a closed side as well. So we’ve moved it a meter off the boundary, to avoid fire rating. Also gives you a nice place to park the bins. So it’s a practical solution. And also, this side looks into this nice courtyard. Eventually, that’ll all be planted.
So you get an opportunity to create a nice entry where you can go into your house, wherever that is. If you’ve got a Queenslander and you’re trying to make the carport feel like part of the Queenslander, the way we do it is we make it like the carport is the baby of the house.
The Carport is a Baby Version of the House
So we match the roof pitch-ups, we match the materials we match the weatherboards. So it all kind of pulls in as one place. Now, another key thing that you have to deal with is the glare off the roof, it can be really unpleasant. Especially in the front of the house where you might have a great view, you’re getting blinded by the reflection off the roof. Never put a white roof in that situation, it’s a mistake. This is quite a dark roof. And when you stand on this veranda, they’ve got a lovely outlook. This roof, the back of the roof actually pitches up away from you. So the roof feels like it’s over there, and it opens up the view through that.
Now the other thing to watch is if you’ve got a water meter on your site that happens to be about here, quite common, sometimes in older suburbs, it’s here. Queensland Urban Utilities used to let you continue the driveway through there. They stopped that practice because there was too much damage to the water meters. So now, they make you put in an application and relocate it. That’s thousands and thousands of dollars, and it can blindside the owners as well. So that might change the position of your carport. They don’t usually mention that till the end. So there’s a heads up for you. So that’s it, double carport in the front. And we’ve got another example.
So here we are. These people had a Queenslander, renovated in the ’50s in quite a nice way. They’re trying to make it look more Queensland. It had a kind of useless garage in there with her stupid tilt doors. And they wanted to get two cars in front of the house, and a veranda at the front. This house has a tilt panel garage, and a low ceiling, completely useless for a four-wheel drive. And they wanted to get two cars in here. They wanted to put a veranda on the front, which faces due west. That’s why those blinds are there because they’ve got a nice view. And this is how it turned out. It’s a few years older.
So you can see that the courtyard and the entry effect and the stairs, it’s looking more Queenslander-like than it actually is. All we did was put on a veranda instead of those blinds. And we’ve put the seamless Queenslander carport addition here again. Here’s the way we did the roof, which is the same as the other one. It hardly blocks the view from that veranda. It’s like the house has had a baby. Here it is with its roller door. It’s still got the two open sides. And there’s plumbing coming through here, and water meters, we’ve just managed to scrape out through here. So those are the key points. You keep the visuals of the two parts the same. It’s a carport with two open sides. But you can still have a roller door on the street. Watch the roof shape, watch the glare, and check your street frontage as well. And that’s how you do a seamless Queenslander carport addition in front of a Queenslander in Brisbane.
