Bringing the outside in and inside out (tiny style)

25 June 2016
ABC RN Blueprint for Living
Interview with Janne Ryan
Image by V&P

Janne Ryan visits Wilston Garden Room

Listen to the Audio here

All right. Now to move from Bhutan to Brisbane, that's a classic move, everyone does it. Even less classic a move is the move from the suburbs into the inner city. Today we're visiting a young Brisbane family who made the counterintuitive journey from living in the inner city back to the suburbs and back to a family home that they'd fled from years earlier.

They had this vision of a tiny eleven square meter room that they called the garden room intimately joining the steep back garden in the old Queenslander. Matt Collins and Sarah Abbott left Brisbane's New Farm and moved to Wilston where Sarah had lived as a teenager. From the street, the house looks the same as it always did. A small kind of one of those one hundred and twenty square meter Queenslanders built about a hundred years ago, but a hallway has been reinstalled and now you can see from the front door, straight through to the back garden. A garden connecting everyone, it's a nice vision. And that's where we joined Janne Ryan in the back garden's amphitheater adjoining the garden room with Matt, Sarah, their two children, and neighbor’s children plus architect, Aaron Peters.

This is a bit of a sloping block. This was the problem for you, Matt. We're in what you're calling an amphitheater.

Yeah. One of the big challenges with the block was that it slopes quite a lot downwards from the street. But with two kids, we were really looking to find how to make that usable for us. Having lived in units for quite a while, we were excited to have a backyard, but it was quite overgrown when we got the house. A lot of lantana, a lot of old trees. So we took some of the lantana, all the of the lantana out, kept some of the big beautiful mango trees.

You didn't quite realize its potential at that point.

No one really came down here that much except to hang out the washing.

Got some chooks here as well.

The girls were really keen to have some chickens. Sarah's parents have a farm on the Sunshine Coast with a lot of animals, quite a menagerie. So we were keen to keep some of that here in Brisbane, in the inner city as well.

No, you have to hold it while I get a laundry bucket. No, you give it to me.

What is that? Do you know?

Just a skink.

Oh, just a skink. Okay.

Just a big skink.

This is a house of your parents used to own.

It's been in our family for most of the time that I was growing up. So it's a really interesting experience now owning it and reshaping it for our family. So it's nice.

And you previously lived in the inner city, New Farm, inner city Brisbane. And moving to the suburbs, to the in-law's house, that's an unusual step.

It certainly wasn't something we'd expected, but we loved the cosmopolitan lifestyle of where we were. But housing affordability and children made us look further afield, which we were a bit nervous about to begin with. But now that we're, we're here, now that we've got a great place and a great area, we really love living here.

So Aaron Peters is the architect and he's with us here in the back garden in the amphitheater. What inspired you to actually ignore the house initially and look at the landscape here?

One of the things that we do when we start a project, is we try and get our clients to share stories with us about how they live and how they might like to live. And that really helps us establish what they value and don't value. And one of the things that it was really clear that they valued a lot in looking at moving was getting access to the garden, getting their feet on the ground. So we went to their apartment in New Farm and we could immediately see what the difficulty was that even though it was a fairly low rise block, there was about three stories of stairs to get down to the communal garden. So immediately that became the focus of this new project and I think of our discussions as well.

So that's interesting. You've come from a high rise apartment block where you had to climb up and down the stairs to a suburban block where you still have to climb up and down the stairs, or not necessarily the stairs as such, but climb up and down the amphitheater.

That's right. It's a lot different though, a very different experience now where we are. I mean the history of this house is really the history of opening it up. When Sarah's parents first bought the house, the front veranda was boarded in as a sleep out, as happens so often with many Queenslanders. And Tony removed that and opened that up. And now I guess the next generation have done that with the back as well in a very different dramatic way.

The garden room is the headline for this house, I guess is a way of describing it. And it's so modest.

It kind of came out of that original brief that the garden was so central to the way that the family wanted to live, but it was also the linchpin around which the whole project worked.

How did you find the concept of the garden room?

So Matt and Aaron did most of the talking about planning. And I think that my brief was really simple. I grew up in the middle of a forest and had a very outdoorsy childhood, and I wanted the same for my children. And I had said to Aaron at the outset, "We will spend most of our time in the backyard and I want the house to be connected to it." We never wanted a big house. We never wanted the renovation to expand the footprint in a huge way. What was important to me was the connectedness. And that's absolutely been achieved. And we spend most of our living time, as you can see right now, out in the garden in this bricked area here and on the stairs all the way up into the kitchen. So the stairs here, the stairs between the garden room and the kitchen and the backyard is where you can find most of the family for most of the day.

So most of your life is actually outside nowadays.

Outside or in the garden room. And particularly-

She's pretty outside.

Yeah, that's right. It opens right up. But one of the things that I always liked is Matt can be working in the living room, I can be down in the garden room, and the kids can be in the backyard and you can see all the way through. But everybody can be in their own space and particularly the kids can play independently and not feel like we're on top of them, but we can still see them when they're young.

Cute baby chair. This one's Lily.

Lily and Rosie. Peppa.

What do you like about living in the garden?

You get to play.

All the time. Oh.

So we're climbing up the stairs now. The amphitheater, which you can sit on or walk through, into the garden room and into the house.

Matt, the hallway, you brought back the hallway.

Yeah. When we first moved in, there was no hallway. The front door just opened straight onto the lounge and dining room. Typically, Queenslanders do have a hallway through the middle and two rooms each side. Aaron was very keen to see the hallway rebuilt and reinstated, but to begin with, we weren't sure at all.

Why not?

The house is quite modest in size. It's pretty small compared particularly to modern houses. And we thought that it in many ways was a waste of space. But Aaron persisted and eventually convinced us to put the hallway in. And one of the things that he did that was great was really make it quite usable rather than just a pathway to other rooms. It's also a place now where we can hang our newspapers, where we can hang our coats, where we can store our keys and small change through some great use of joinery and design.

Why were you so sure about it?

It allowed us to create this really amazing connection between the front garden and the back garden. Now you can look from the living rooms out through the front window, across the front veranda to the front wall of the house across the street from this house, and you can turn your head ninetey degrees and you can look out to the side yard and then another ninetey degrees and look all the way across the backyard, across the neighboring houses at the rear of the house and then up across the suburb and toward the hills to the north. So even though it's a really small house, you’ve got this really incredibly expansive moment in the building where you can look all the way through the building and take in the surrounding suburb.

So bring back the hallway.

In this instance, the hallway was a tool that allowed us to unlock a whole bunch of other things.

So lunchtime.

Afternoon tea.

Afternoon tea.

Cutting up some fruit, they can sit downstairs and eat.

Yeah. Do they ever come inside?

Reluctantly.

Reluctantly.

Reluctantly. They have to pour with rain. They ride their scooter down the hall.

So what these guys have done is they've put in the hallway, but we've also got the light through the skylights and the openness. And that was important for me. So when I was arguing against the hallway, it was all about light and openness and they've put one in and achieved the same result.

What do your parents think of the hallway? Because they spend a lot of their years knocking it out, making it open, opening it up. Now you've closed it up a bit.

They really love it. They love coming back. They really enjoyed seeing it taking shape. We spent a lot of time with mom and dad as the construction started walking through and wondering what it would look like and they love it. They love spending time here now with us and with their grandchildren in this house.

That's RN's, Janne Ryan with architect Aaron Peters and the owners, Matt Collins and Sarah Abbott.