Urban Barnyard House

Urban Barnyard House is the renovation and extension of an early twentieth-century weatherboard cottage in Reservoir, Melbourne. The brief was to remove the existing lean-to kitchen and add a new kitchen, dining and living area along with a flexible living or guest room, then reconfigure the original house to provide three bedrooms, a walk-in robe to the master, a family bathroom, a second WC, laundry and storage. Finishes throughout were updated to unify the old and new parts of the home.

The project began as a consultation. The owners had already drawn up an extension and were about to build, but could not get excited about the design. Reviewing their brief, Inbetween Architecture saw scope to bring far more of the clients' personality and lifestyle into the house, drawing reference from site photographs of their chickens, bees and a timber shed in the backyard. The owners chose to start again, and the redesign was developed closely with them, each decision weighed against how the family lives now and how it will grow.

The completed single-storey home spans 178 square metres on a 527 square metre site and was finished in 2017. It later featured in Open House's Naked Architect Series 2, a programme guiding the public on commissioning and working with a residential architect.

Architecture by Inbetween Architecture (Steph Richardson and John Liu). Photography by Nic Granleese.