Brisbane house gets rid of open plan and brings back rooms

25 October 2014
ABC RN By Design
Interview with Janne Ryan
Image by V&P

Stuart Vokes & Cat O’Donovan talk to Janne Ryan about the West End Tower.

Listen to the audio here

Now on By Design, we are off to Brisbane and to the inner city, where an old Queenslander has encouraged its owner, Catherine O'Donovan, and architect Stuart Vokes, to rediscover the value of smaller rooms, rather than an open plan design.
               
It's been quite the journey for these clients and the architect, blending the old building with a new extension, but coming up with fresh ideas about the way that buildings shape the way that we are. ByDesign's Janne Ryan is with Catherine and Stuart, and here is their story.

The house itself when we bought it was in really bad nick. It was like a crack house. It was really bad. It was split into two flats.

Are these are the original floorboards and the colour?

Yeah, they were the original brand of floorboards. When we pulled the lino, there was a green paint on it, and we liked that. We actually pulled up the old floorboards and repositioned them, because there were so many gaps.

They were living in this strange kind of two-flat house that had two kitchens and two laundries and two bathrooms, which actually sounds like the brief room contemporary house, but it's a really strange floor plan.

In an interesting twist, you've put the kitchen on the veranda.

Well, when we looked at putting the kitchen anywhere else, it would take a huge footprint. I was quite keen to have a long, simple kitchen with not too much structure in it. That helped drive that decision to put the kitchen on the veranda. I love the feeling of being in here, and having the windows open and the sun in, and the breeze through the place. It's a beautiful space, this one.

Very beautiful in its simplicity with the green painted old wooden veranda, and just the old windows just opening across to the neighbors in the back garden. Stuart, is this the way we're going?

There's always been this default idea that what you do with the original core rooms as you stick all of the utility spaces into the center of the house, the kitchen and the bathrooms. Then you get the old sleep out or the old veranda and return it to its original open condition. I think what's really beautiful here is that it reminds us that most of your domestic life revolves around conducting really banal activities and daily rituals of cooking and cleaning up after children and bathing.
               
I think we should challenge the idea that the kitchen should be a trophy within the house, and that maybe we should start reminding ourselves that we all spend a lot of time in the engine room of the house, and that it should be putting the best part of the house on the best part of the site.

Hard to know where one room stops in another starts.

Another starts, yeah.

You know you're on the old veranda because you're under a raking ceiling. The telltale sign of the mapping of these Queenslanders is that if you're in a room with a level ceiling, then you're in the old original interior.

If it's sloping?

If you're under a raking ceiling, a sloping ceiling, then that means you're on the old veranda. Then we've used the floor as a coding system as well. The coloring of the floor and the way that the floor is managed is also a kind of way finding tool.

After all this chat, of course, saying that you wanted to re-inhabit the Queenslander, you have built something on the outside. Why?

The primary need was that we had two children. We only had two bedrooms. We knew we needed another bedroom, and we also wanted a study.

We think it's really important within these backyard projects to try and reengage or reconcile the former disengagement between the elevated timber floor and the garden. More and more, we realize, through having my own children, we're reminded that the ground is the territory of a child. It's where the child intuitively wants to be.

In Queensland, one has always had to suffer that problem of children being in the backyard, and parents being inside the building ...

And above.

... And above, by sometimes a whole story. Growing up in Queensland, it was not uncommon to hear the bellows of a parent yelling out the window ...

Come and get your tea, kids!

Yeah. You remember it right. You could hear it echoing through the suburbs of Brisbane.

Down the corridor we go with the garden on one side, it's not obvious, this extension. It's very quiet.

Yeah. A lot of people don't realize it's here. Our street has a lot of Queenslanders on it, so we wanted to make sure that we weren't keeping with the feel of the street.

Stuart, what's the idea of bringing back the room, when we spent so long getting rid of rooms?

I think what we're recognizing is that we've gone through decades of testing the open plan as families. Many of our clients are coming to us with the first story about how their open plan diagram in the house is failing them.

How?

I think everyone's starting to understand intuitively that there's almost a singular way of occupying an open plan. There are certain events that are beautifully accommodated within an open plan, but not all of the events that take place in a family house are well suited to a singular room.

Give me an example of what works, and worked for a while, and then no longer does?

The open plan was a necessary detour in the floor planning of a family house as a way of starting to break down some of the negative attributes of a cellular plan, of a plan that's made up of a society of rooms. Maybe that was a kind of social move, to pull those events that were otherwise conducted by someone in isolation, doing the laundry or preparing food, et cetera, were brought into the public realm of the social spaces of the family.

That's a really important social change in the family unit that represents a shift in how we now understand those responsibilities or those events that take place in the house as being a collective agenda, not just the agenda of one person in the household.

Is it because we're finding now that families are staying together longer and they have lost privacy, or they can't manage in the way people used to leave home rather than stay at home?

There’s not as much opportunity for pause or silence. I think in our contemporary lives, houses more and more are proving to be the place within the city where you can find some solitude. I think rooms are really symbolic of that.

Families change so much. With babies, you need to be close. Then as they get older that you want to get a bit of space between you, so that they can be more independent. I feel like watching Liam grow up in this house, I've seen him now, he's five. You think, "Oh, he wants his own space, his own corner."
               
The kids have just a fabulous time in it. There's places to hide. There's places to be out and exposed. There's places for the family to sit down and interact. There's also places for them to just sit and be quiet, and watch TV or read a book.

Also, maybe the idea of room planning as opposed to open planning; there are lessons to be learned from a building that has a hierarchy of rooms, a group of rooms of varied scales and varied relationships to the garden. Each of those rooms have values that start to determine behavior. I think these are lessons for children that are probably, this is just a speculation, but are these lessons learned in an open plan building, or are these lessons only learned from a society of or a hierarchy of rooms?
               
Behavioral lessons can then be scaled up to the scale of the city. There's a way that you can behave at the football stadium, which is different to your behavior in the public library. Maybe these lessons are learned in the family house.

Thanks, Cat.

Thanks, Janne.

Thanks, Janne.

Architect Stuart Vokes there with client Catherine O'Donovan, that was in their West End Queenslander with a new extension. You can find some images and links on our website as always. That's the show. Jen Ryan is our producer. Joe Wallace, looking after the sound. My name's Fenella, and do stay with us. Michael McKenzie is up now on a train for RN First Bite.