BISMARCK HOUSE
The Bismarck House is the younger sibling of a pair of semi-detached dwellings in Bondi. The design uses raw materials and sculpted spaces to integrate house and garden while orchestrating social interactions between the more public areas of the house and the laneway that runs along the semi’s northern boundary.
The studio worked with the idea of a “continuous garden”... to place the garden at the heart of the scheme.
The house, which was shortlisted in the house interior, residential rebirth, and urban house categories for the Dezeen Awards 2020, was designed for Will Dangar of landscape practice Dangar Barin Smith, to be noticeably different from the surrounding residential neighbourhood.
“Bondi is a popular coastal place set within beautiful geography but marked with an agglomeration of poor quality building stock,” says Andrew Burges Architects founder, Andrew Burges.“the idea was that the house would function primarily as a site for holiday rentals, while also demonstrating the capacity of our client’s construction and landscape design companies.”
The site is located on a lane that serves shops and cafes on the Bondi Road leading to Bondi Beach, and held a single-storey building that didn’t take full advantage of the sun and air.
The architects kept the front room and porch of the existing house and worked within the envelope of that space, but the rest of the original building was demolished with the bricks cleaned and reused for the new, twostorey construction.
“We were interested in the laneway for its potential for social interaction between the house and lane, the grittiness, and also the opportunity, given the client makes gardens, to create a footprint that extended the presence of the garden along the length of the laneway,” says Burges.
The studio worked with the idea of a “continuous garden” as a way of organising and maximising the space, and to place the garden at the heart of the scheme. In order to create a fluid relationship between the inside and outside, the studio considered both the garden and the building itself as the ground floor of the house.
“Our starting point was to think of the site boundary of the house as the ground level house enclosure,” says Burges.
“Glazing and walls form moments within the site boundary that also happen to make thermal and rain enclosures, but these alignments have not been considered as the house perimeter – the site is the perimeter,” he adds.