Put the dunny back outside

4 January 2012
ABC RN By Design
Interview with Janne Ryan

Stuart Vokes talks to Janne Ryan about Four Room Cottage.

Listen to the audio here

Now we take you on site to a building that is all about the miniature. A four room wooden house in the inner Brisbane suburb of Kelvin Grove. It was built at the turn of the 20th century and is now, after 100 years, getting a makeover of a rather unexpected kind.

The walls and tiny rooms are being kept, and the dunny has been taken back outside with two small cubicles clipped onto the side veranda. Why you might ask? In an era of the open plan house and the essential en suite, this renovation might make you think. And we'd love to hear your thoughts about whether we should keep more walls and whether we should really rethink the position and size of the bathroom and toilet.

Should they go back outside? Today, Stuart Vokes, one of the emerging Brisbane architectural firm, Owen and Vokes, is at the building site with ByDesign's, Janne Ryan.

I’m with Stuart Vokes. Obviously, the original house was nowadays too small to live in. Is that right?

Yeah, this project's definitely an exercise in miniature. And surprisingly, the project only yields an extra 20 square meters of extension, which for an extension project's actually quite small.

And what would that be, 20 square meters? A big bedroom?

For our projects, it's a large bedroom, I think.

Yeah. Yeah. Now I'm looking in and it's, Oh my God. I mean, everybody listening to this will know this. There's a hallway in the middle, a little wooden walls and rooms off the hallway. A couple of what would've been bedrooms in the old days.

That's right.

And then at the back, perhaps the kitchen off the back veranda and a bathroom off the back veranda. And it's essentially still the same. Let's go in.

As one of the strategies for keeping this project small, we thought, "Well, what if we were to embody the qualities of being on the veranda in this beautiful garden setting within an interior space?" Therefore, we wouldn't have to increase the actual footprint of the building and begin to build into this great garden, which is so rare to find.

One of the things you've done, which is tremendous in Queensland, and perhaps it could work in other climates as well, is that you've put an outdoor fire just off the kitchen. That can be for sitting around in winter or for cooking and things like that.

That's right.

That's part of the garden theoretically, or is that part of the house?

I think it's both. And it sounds like a cliche, this idea that we might blur those thresholds between interior and exterior. But when you think about the element of the fireplace, there's a thermal component to the fireplace, but there's also a highly visual component. It's part of the experience of the interior, and yet, you get this really lovely informal way of reclining next to the fireplace on these what will be brick stairs that climb back up to the terrace here.

Underneath the tree.

That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Let's go a little further in here, because this is a house with walls rather than a house without walls. A lot of people are doing open plan. That seems to be the style of the moment. Open up and share the space. And everybody in the one space, all activities. You are going a little bit the opposite way here. Why?

I think over the last eight years of making houses for our clients, we slowly came to realize that walls were actually our ally. And it was walls that actually allowed us to control or produce certain characters within rooms.

Let's go to one and see.

If we go into one of the original rooms here at the front corner.

This one?

That's right.

This would've been a bedroom.

That's right. Yeah.

And would've been a main a bedroom.

Well, it could be a bedroom, and that's possible simply because we retained its original walls, I think. And there was a lot of pressure, I suppose, or there would be in a normal project to actually demolish the wall. I'll just take off this tape here. But the story for this room is that it will be occupied with a dining table and dining chairs and a sideboard. With this-

And it's tiny.

Well, it is tiny, but in fact, if we put a table in here, we could fit a three meter long table in here and occupy this with eight people.

What you're saying to make, it's a tight fit, but that brings people together?

Well, if you make us a true study of occupation in each room and how a room might be furnished, begin to realize you need less space than you would've thought.

Now, you have cut a hole though in the wall here.

We have cut a hole.

And it's like a little stable, stable doors.

This is about climatic tuning, I suppose. In summer, when this room does receive a lot of light and unbearable heat in the late afternoon, that we can actually relieve it thermally by opening up these panels and actually induce this great cross ventilation through the house. There are going to be a whole range of events that occur in this house. And some of those events might actually require a volume that is visually much larger. And using walls as a device to manipulate the character of a room.

[...] Stuart, one of the really interesting things is the width or depths of the wall.

Well, Janne, in fact, this wall that we're standing next to now is actually only in the door threshold, it appears to be one hundred mils wide. But in fact, the wall depth itself is only nineteen mils thick, which is the original hoop pine solid timber board that's used to construct the wall.

It's a single layer of wood.

That's right. And these are actually a structural component of the building.

Does it matter how thick a wall is?

Having grown up in Brisbane and building buildings in Brisbane, we are constantly searching for depth within our buildings. And you can witness that in the way that Brisbane architects are prone to layering their facades as a way of managing the climate. You might end up with screens and louvers and overhangs, which enable this kind of composition of depth within the building.

But we search for a more literal depth within the walls because there's this beautiful idea about a robustness or a timelessness, a permanence, about a thicker wall. It's almost an emotional or a psychological response to the depth of a wall.

Whereas these nineteen mil walls evoke this sense of the temporal or that maybe it isn't going to be here tomorrow. But at the same time, there is something quite fantastic about this idea that you're living in a cardboard box or a cubby house.

And perhaps these are things that culturally, we take on. But it's not till someone tells us that your culture has thick walls or thin walls, that you start to understand how you live and how you understand your spaces.

And what I thought was really telling was that we were in Melbourne and having a conversation with a Portuguese architect, Manuel Aires Mateus. And I was describing the thickness of the walls in the buildings that we live in. And I was using this pinch gesture between my index finger and thumb describing the thickness of our walls. And he came up, he had his own measuring stick, which was stretching his thumb and his pinky out. And then stepping his fingers across the wall to describe how thick the walls were in Portugal.

But of course, he's probably using stone.

Yeah, definitely, he's using masonry.

Therein lies the difference.

Stuart, one of the other really fascinating things you've done in this little house is that you've taken the dunny outside. For a long time, just as we opened up spaces, everybody brought the toilet and everything right inside. You had to go to the toilet right next to the bed or right next to the dining room table. You've taken, you've gone back outside. Can we go outside?

Yeah. Well, we can go through the kitchen.

Let's go through the kitchen.

Because the whole idea about the kitchen is that you have to step down from the original cottage down onto the kitchen floor, which is paved in brickwork.

But look, here we are on a really... Oh gosh, this brings back memories, an old fashioned veranda that the bedroom have doors that come out onto the veranda. And I guess in the old days, people probably sat out here or there was an extra bed out here to sleep in the afternoon.

Yeah, definitely.

Or Uncle came to stay.

Definitely.

And the kids stayed in a back bed, but now it's become bathroom.

There are two bathrooms that we...

And what do you do in here? Go down a set of stairs?

Yeah. Into this little sunken bath.

Tiny, that sunken bath.

Which hasn't received it's skylight yet.

Oh, I see.

It'll be flooded in light.

It'll be flooded in light.

Yeah. We always put skylights over our showers so that you have that advantage of showering in water that is given this whole extra set of life through the sun that pierces the water droplets.

But it's very, dare I say, glamorous.

Yes, it is. Even though it's only nine hundred wide.

Yeah. It's tiny.

And we'll just push this window open.

That's very private.

Yeah, it's a sneaky little window that actually gives them oblique views down through the valley and across to other people's gardens, whilst maintaining some great privacy.

Lots of breezeways happening everywhere. It's all designed for the breeze to work.

Well, this whole idea about reoccupying the veranda was that we really wanted to retain its principle purpose as a place of circulation. What we've actually been able to reintroduce into this planned diagram is an ability to circumnavigate the core.

There's this wonderful thing about arrangement between the bedrooms and the breezeway. And then this working wall of wet areas, which allows anyone to access any of the facilities. I've always disliked this idea that there might be two or three toilets in a house, but at least one of them is accessed via someone's private bedroom. I like this idea that if you're going to pay for two toilets and invest in all of those things that you make them publicly accessible.

Stuart, it's a great inspiration. Thank you for showing ByDesign round this beautiful little house today.

Thank you, Jan.

The Brisbane architect, Stuart Vokes with ByDesign's Jan Ryan.