Designed as a forever home for a young family, Evelyn is a house encouraging connection. Stitching together a pre-1911 cottage with contemporary additions to create a new diagram for living, immersed in landscape, that enables freedom and ease of movement between indoor and outdoor realms.

Central to the brief was to reassert the original charm and history whilst creating a contemporary home. The cottage was retained and extensively restored uniting old and new. Deliberate moments reference the cottage’s origins. Internally, the crafted joinery referencing the hand-built nature of the cottage’s past define boundaries between old and new. Timber detailing connects the cottage with its contemporary extension and the dramatic stone anchors the focus within.

The architecture is determined by the “backyard” transplanted at the heart of the site. The interior spaces enveloping the garden heart borrow light, breeze and outlook from this landscaped core. Narrow spaces around the back and sides of the house are intensely planted to provide amenity to rooms, promote cross ventilation and establish rooms surrounded by garden. Fluidity and calm define Evelyn’s spatial ambition, spurred by a palette refined to timber, tin, concrete and stuccoed masonry.

Evelyn showcases how a considered response to brief, existing conditions and architectural drivers can enhance liveability and joy. Harbouring a deep, embodied understanding of the nuances of family life, this house is entirely customised to the needs and desires of this family, but carefully considered to allow for familial evolution, and all the joy and intensity in between.

Furniture: Eco Outdoor, Stylecraft, Jardan, Janie Collins Interiors, Living Edge, artwork (Laura Patterson). Lighting: Volker Haug, About Space, Flos, Only U, Bright Green, Lighting Collective. Finishes: Signorio, Finecoat Solid Plastering, Artedomus. Fittings & Fixtures: AstraWalker Qasair, Smeg, Fisher and Paykel, Zip.

Photography: Dianna Snape, Content Lion