Bustle House

Bustle House is the renovation and extension of an ageing nineteenth-century Victorian terrace in inner Melbourne. What began as a familiar task grew into a broader question for FMD Architects: how a constantly changing society lives with, and cares for, the architecture it inherits. The brief was shaped by the client's view of herself as the current caretaker of an "old lady", a building that had stood before her and would outlast her.

Beauty, ageing, utility and continuity were explored through that analogy, with the existing house imagined as an old lady wearing a bustle dress. Perched on a hill at the edge of an elongated corner site, the terrace was understood through its side elevation. The architectural drawings were developed like Victorian portraits taken in profile, the format once used to illustrate the pronounced fashions of women's bustle dresses. Treated as a language of self-expression, the bustle became the architectural equivalent of an addition that lends character and presence without recreating the original identity or cloaking its aged grace.

The modest addition holds a kitchen, dining room, bathroom and laundry, and sits to the rear of the existing house, central to the site and its garden. That position lets the extension build and blur the relationship between house, backyard and the adjacent street and community, a deliberate response to the traditional private backyard. The bustle is referenced in the curved walls and windows of the extension and in a ribbon of timber that oscillates along the side boundary. The timber balustrade reads as lacework and the trees that grow through it as embroidery, completing the image of the carriage dress and tying the additions back to the existing house.

Rather than reshape the building's identity, the project lets the house age gracefully, treating its weathered character as something to respect. The result argues for the original home as something unfinished yet undeniably beautiful.

Project size: 193 m2. Completed 2017.

Architect: FMD Architects (Fiona Dunin, with Alice Edmonds, Robert Kolak and Jayme Collins). Photography by Peter Bennetts.