Cross-Stitch House

Cross-Stitch House is the renovation and extension of a Victorian terrace in Melbourne by FMD Architects. The brief was straightforward: add new living spaces, relocate the kitchen and bathroom, and bring more daylight into a previously dark, damp interior. One unusual request shaped the whole scheme. The client wanted three tapestries, made by her mother, woven into the design.

FMD took that starting point literally. Drawing on the craft of tapestry and stitching, the practice made the idea of stitching the new house to the old its organising concept. Timber beams act as the thread, running from the living room through the existing house and out to a western courtyard, where they converge on a single large timber column that reads like a bobbin. A mirror placed at the end of these threads extends the courtyard and creates a sense of the weave unravelling. The beams then twist across the western facade to shade the living area, with planting set to grow over them in time. A final beam stretches the width of the site to reinforce the outline of the house and mark the tie-off of a tapestry, a motif echoed again in the paving and the internal joinery.

The result blurs the line between architecture, interior and landscape, with no clear point where one discipline ends and the next begins. Although the site and its spaces are compact, the continuous beams tie inside to outside so the house reads as one larger, singular volume. Daylight and ventilation were planned with care: skylights are positioned and courtyards inserted to draw light and air through the plan across the day, and a water garden doubles as a natural cooling system for the living room. Materials are simple, economical and locally sourced, used in rich and inventive ways. What was a dark Victorian terrace is now a sequence of light-filled, well-ventilated spaces that open onto the exterior, an oasis of spaciousness rare in inner-city living.

Architect: FMD Architects (Fiona Dunin, Andrew Carija, Robert Kolak). Photography: Peter Bennetts.