House in a Warehouse

‘House In a Ware­house’ is a new dwelling in an old ware­house shell, designed to be a gar­den oasis. 

Ini­tial­ly, the site was a 200 m² land­locked ware­house, built to all bound­aries and entered via a new res­i­den­tial devel­op­ment, locat­ed in a dense urban setting.

The dri­ving con­cept is to cre­ate a ​‘gar­den oasis’ with­in the con­fines of a build­ing with­out exist­ing out­door space. The first response involves plac­ing gar­dens across all four lev­els of the house con­nect­ing direct­ly to inter­nal spaces. The design solu­tion allows the notion of ​‘inte­ri­or’ to extend beyond the infill, to the periph­ery of the ware­house walls, thus invit­ing the out­side in. To add lay­ers and matu­ri­ty, the house also opens to sur­round­ing neigh­bour­ing gar­dens beyond. This is made pos­si­ble through a series of for­mal archi­tec­tur­al decisions.

The house form steps back from the saw­tooth shell, using the exist­ing three-sto­ry wall to the south as one of its skins, for func­tion­al, aes­thet­ic and sus­tain­able pur­pos­es. Main liv­ing spaces on lev­el 1, cap­ture views, sun and neigh­bour­ing green­ery, whilst the ground floor con­tains children’s bed­rooms open­ing onto a safe pri­vate gar­den. Upper lev­els includes pri­vate spaces off the mas­ter bed­room and roof ter­races for entertaining.

A lay­ered sys­tem of screen­ing splits the site, mod­er­ates and frames views allow­ing a feel­ing of open­ness and pri­va­cy. Over time, these screens will act as plant screens, encour­ag­ing foliage up and over the building. 

A sec­ondary con­cept embraces the rem­nants of a ware­house feel, by adapt­ing and rein­ter­pret­ing parts of the exist­ing ware­house in a con­tem­po­rary way. This sub­tly per­me­ates the home across many scales. The aes­thet­ic bal­ances tex­ture and warmth, com­bined with fresh fin­ish­es and con­nec­tions with the old ware­house shell. 

Many ele­ments of the ware­house are reused both struc­tural­ly and aes­thet­i­cal­ly employ­ing more cost-effec­tive design solu­tions. Addi­tion­al­ly, much of the join­ery is site built from exist­ing beams and steel plates. 

This house explores notions of re-use with­out look­ing ​‘recy­cled’ and uses aspects of sus­tain­abil­i­ty. It is designed to per­form well pas­sive­ly, it con­tains inte­grat­ed water and ener­gy sav­ing sys­tems to min­imis­es its impact on sur­round­ing properties.