An Elegant and Spacious Modern Home for a Humble Family in Northcote

Stonewood House by Breathe architecture

Stonewood is efficient: its elegant plan offers flexibility for a humble family. It’s operable screens transform connecting spaces, sectioning large areas into intimate nooks, directing views, and channelling breezes. Folding and unfolding according to use, Stonewood reveals a different story in each configuration, appearing effortlessly spacious within a modest footprint. Stonewood presents an aspirational solution to a designing on a modest bu dget. The 8.5 star rated home utilizes elegant planning, and passive methods of thermal comfort to tackle a site presenting a series of dichotomous interests. With a street address and sun to the north, privacy to the south, and heritage context to the west; Stonewood’s operable façade serves to resolve each of these needs.

Sitting compact and forward on the site, Stonewood easily transitions into a pubic, social platform. The hinged ground floor façade opens, welcoming in light while drawing the interior into the garden or further into the community domain. Taking the form of a simple two-storey dwelling, Stonewood borrows scale and proportion from a neighbouring 1850’s bluestone cottage, while it’s symmetrical door and window openings recall the familiar Georgian expression of ‘home’.

Sustainability Statement. Stonewood is small, efficient, dynamic and adaptable. A home with rooms with multiple functions able to adapt to differing conditions over time. A home with an efficient plan, a modest footprint and a modest budget. A home that brings architectural delight to it’s occupants and the community with little embodied energy, and that would continue to operate with a greatly reduced energy profile.

Photos by: Breathe architecture & Andrew Wuttke