Text description provided by the architects. The Naples Street House is a small-scale home, clad entirely in brick siding. From this exterior footprint, the house turns inward, wrapping around a central outdoor garden room and using the forms of the folded and undulating roofline to organize the views so that only the sky and neighboring trees are encountered from inside the house. From the inside, the house forms its own intimate relationship with the context of light, sun, and seasonal change.
A home for three generations of the same family: our clients, their children, and our clients’ elderly parents. The master double bedrooms for the elders of the two-parent family are located in opposite corners of the house and are reflected in the house by the alternating forms of the roof that rise and fall in alternate and opposing corners. Spatially, this is experienced as a cycle of rising and falling forms, as a cyclical change, as its occupants circulate around the central courtyard. Externally, the house presents a uniform outer skin of a universal brick cladding that wraps around the exterior walls, over the folded and pitched roof forms, and descends into the central courtyard. This singular material presents the house as a sculpted solid, formally mimicking the urban diagram of the low-pitched roof forms of the original interwar houses in the neighborhood.
Inside, the floors are polished concrete, while all the walls and joinery in the house’s communal areas are clad in rich, sturdy mottled plywood. The undulating ceiling planes, which rise upwards and spatially define each of the main shared spaces for cooking, eating and sitting, are painted a soft grey, emphasising the play of light and shadow on the precisely folded planes. The bedrooms are lined with this immersive grey palette, becoming an arena for the play of soft shadows from the gardens beyond to play on evenly and softly lit surfaces.
In contrast to the stark exterior, the interiors are rich in texture, defined by wax-finished spotted gum lined walls and ceilings that soar to the heights defined by the pitched roof, providing moments of generosity and surprise to the shared living spaces. The bricks were all carbon neutral and have enormous longevity, allowing the house to start with a low carbon footprint and remain in place for many generations to come. The Australian-sourced hardwood plywood cladding for the walls is sustainably and locally sourced. The structural floor slab has been polished to provide the finished floor surface and reduce the cost and additional material usage of an applied finish.
The central garden room allows the northern sun to penetrate deep into the living spaces of the house during the winter, passively warming the thermal mass of the polished concrete floors while remaining naturally shaded and cool during the summer. The house is naturally ventilated by numerous windows and operable doors, allowing cross ventilation to all spaces via the central courtyard.
The floor plan positions the bedrooms and bathrooms for our clients and their children as an eastern wing separated from the social spaces of the house by an axial entrance corridor that connects the views and light from the main entrance to the rear garden of the house. This corridor flows into and through the north facing living, kitchen and dining spaces and continues to flow around the central garden room to a more secluded sitting room, which itself opens to the northern sun through the generous garden void in the middle of the house. The house sets back from the eastern and northern boundaries to allow access to the northern sun and views of a majestic gum tree. The setback of the side boundary allows a thick garden to grow over time to create a buffer between the neighbouring house.
