Ruzzene House

Neutral Bay, NSW
1997

This house replaces a cottage on a long narrow site, with north to the street frontage. The original houses in the street are freestanding row houses built to the side boundary on one side only with a narrow walkway down the other side separating the adjacent houses. Internally they have a ‘shotgun’ plan with a long corridor running alongside the boundary wall with identical bedrooms opening off this corridor, and gaining their light and ventilation from the walkway between houses. The corridor terminates in the living areas at the rear of the house.

We have adopted this basic typology, but expressed it more clearly by providing a north facing sawtooth roof to each room along the corridor and utilising the natural fall from front to back of the site to introduce a lower level, and terminate the corridor in a double height living space. A roof terrace opening off the main bedroom, built to the same module as all other rooms on the first floor allows northern light to penetrate into this southern most space.

This double height living space spatially extends in two directions, into the rear walled courtyard to the south, which borrows the mature trees of neighbouring properties, and north into the dining room and kitchen. The simple logic of this house is clearly articulated in the repetitive modular construction, but with the addition of a number of secondary elements such as the roofs, louvred wall panels, aluminium cladding panels and large sliding wall panels, the whole takes on a greater complexity.

Builder: John Alvarez
Photographer: Ross Honeysett