Altered Estates
The Sun Herald
Sunday November 3, 1991
IF your home and your family are incompatible, you have three options. You can sell and hope to make a better choice next time. You can redecorate and refurnish so at least it looks good.
Or you can call in the big guns - the architects - and tackle some serious home renovations.
Altering Your Home, A Book of Renovator's Options is a new book for those considering the third option. Based on the renovation plans which appear weekly in The Sydney Morning Herald, it presents 68 renovation proposals by qualified architects.
Author Stella de Vulder, director of marketing and information for the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, described the book as an "ideas catalogue".
"It's a cheap way of seeing into a professional's mind," she said. "I'm always delighted by the solutions architects come up with and quite often I'm still surprised. A lot of houses look hopeless."
The plans deal with all sorts of houses, including terrace, dual occupancy and those on constricted blocks of land. They also cover a range of problems, from creating courtyards and increasing indoor space to separating the kids'rooms from the parents' and improving privacy from neighbours.
Ms de Vulder said one of the most popular alterations was opening the back of the house to the garden. The house pictured above (by architect John Doyle)is a good example of what can be achieved.
"Many plans (in the book) deal with opening up the back of old houses by turning the brick wall into a glass wall. By putting in windows or sliding doors, you are opening up to the garden. Often the extension also creeps out into the garden, adding a family or sitting room."
She believes one of the smartest alterations in the book is one where the architect let more light into a free-standing timber house and increased its privacy from a neighbouring two-storey building at the same time.
Architect Robert Young proposed building a new wing along the boundary with the neighbours and increasing the wing's roofline to prevent them seeing into the back garden.
Another clever alteration involves a tiny, inner-city home on a thin block
Architect Tim Conrad proposed moving the front door to make use of passageway space and using a galley kitchen and laundry to connect the house with the back sheds (now the main bedroom). He effectively turned a narrow, dark house into a light-filled dwelling with doubled living space.
Such transformations are not cheap. The latter would have cost from$60,000, said Ms de Vulder, and most examples in the book require at least$50,000.
However, a few cheaper alterations are mentioned.
If you already have a back sunroom, installing French doors can "bring in the feeling of the back yard" for a few thousand dollars. Switching rooms or changing a doorway's position is also a relatively inexpensive way of improving the way a house operates.
"You have to think about how you bring in the shopping from the car. Where is the traffic flow?" Ms de Vulder said. "Every room needs a good uninterrupted corner of living space, where someone won't walk across your toes."
One plan shows a house where the main entrance was in the corner of the living room, resulting in a major thoroughfare running diagonally across the room to the main hallway. The architect's solution was to build a new main entrance on the side, leaving the living room as a peaceful haven from the rest of the house.
Changing an entrance like this would cost from $10,000, said Ms de Vulder, maybe less if you did some of the work yourself.
Of course, architects cost money too-eight to 12 per cent of the total renovation cost, in fact. Yet Ms de Vulder strongly believes they are worth the money.
"I don't believe you get the best solution with just a builder," she said. "For really clever ideas which improve the quality of life and the value of your home you need an architect.
"Architects can stop you over-spending. You might want five bedrooms and they'll explain how you can get by with less. They can also stop you over-capitalising on your property. And they know about cheaper and better materials."
There's also a headache-saving advantage. An architect is usually employed to see the job through - collecting builders' quotes and later instructing the builders and contractors.
But the main reason for hiring an architect is good, practical design.
"Architects are very good at giving good storage and providing cupboards. They can see ways to separate bedrooms or tuck the laundry under the stairs. They can create built-in wardrobes, desks and shelves," Ms de Vulder said.
"Even increased density housing needn't be awful if it is designed well."
They can also ensure common pitfalls are avoided, the main one being orientation.
"You could charge out and find your extension is facing south or south-west," said Ms de Vulder. "I've actually been in a house where someone did just that. The extension was the wrong way round and they were always in the shade |"
* Altering Your Home, A Book of Renovator's Options, $19.95, is published by Simon and Schuster.
© 1991 The Sun Herald