ENCHANTED SPIRIT
THESE PAGES the new rear extension of this Sydney home includes a living area, dining area and a main bedroom; landscaping by Thomas Ellicott from Concept Green. Details, last pages.
If it was a viable option, Ewan Morton and Margo Harbison would have invested in a luxury tent, such is their passion for the 2400-square-metre garden they share with their daughters in Sydney. Instead they embraced a more metaphorical approach.
On family holidays Margo’s sister, architect Polly Harbison, would sketch ideas for an extension to replace the 1950s lean-to on their Federation house. The unusually long garden was everything to the couple, and they wanted to feel as if they were living in it. So was born the Garden Room, a space more suited to a Luca Guadagnino film set than here among the battle-axe blocks of Sydney’s North Shore.
“The garden has a grove of trees in the middle and a heady mix of flowers in every shape and colour,” says Harbison. “They wanted their house to have a similar combination of rich colours and textures yet with the same feeling of calmness.”
Colour, texture and calm are collectively what interiors studio Arent&Pyke do best, and so the firm was engaged to collaborate with Polly. “Collaboration as a concept and word is so heavily overused today,” says the studio’s co-founder Juliette Arent Squadrito, “but this project really had a wonderful collaborative spirit to it that felt so natural, so joyous.” Builder Stefan Zandt and Arent&Pyke’s Genevieve Hromas and SarahJane Pyke were much involved in the project, but none quite like Ewan and Margo, herself a painter so especially intrigued with the questions of colour. “Stefan balked a little at the short list of 38 colours for brush-outs,” says Harbison, “but Margo, being an artist, completely understood the importance of the smallest variations in shade and tone.”
Her sister, meanwhile, conceived a single storey that would connect the home to the garden by way of spatial manipulation. “A sequence of increasing scales create this sort of warped perspective effect to really draw the garden into the house,” she explains. The floors are stepped down to the garden level and culminate in a fourmetre-high space, increasing in width as well as height. “During construction,” says Harbison, “as the drama of these heights revealed themselves, Ewan — who is six foot six — felt short for the first time in his life.”
Daughters Emma, Alice, and Eloise have all inherited Dad’s tall genes. Now they have the original house to themselves, but stay connected via a communal meeting place. “We wanted the kitchen in the middle to connect the family,” says Morton. It also finds connection to the garden via a northfacing courtyard, and the area forms a sort of threshold between the old and the new. ››