There is one certain pleasure in detecting an incidence of twinning – usually when two friends wear clothes of similar colors and styles. The game consists of choosing the similarities at the same time as the differences. Zuzana and Nicholas’s Red Hill House and Studio, a renovation of a timber worker’s cottage that provides a home for their young family and business, contains many townhouses. There is the architect couple themselves: Zuzana Kovar and Nicholas Skepper met at university, later married and now run an architecture firm that bears their names (not surnames). There are their twin sons, whose room is adorned with matching Tyrannosaurus rex toys, and their two fondly remembered old greyhounds: Max and Maggie. There is also the house itself, with its twin uses of family home (upper level) and architecture studio (lower level) – a version of a commercial house. And, of course, there are layers of the new interspersed with the old: 21st century interventions made in a wooden house from the beginning of the 20th century.
To preserve the green space, all new rooms are accommodated within the footprint of the existing house.
Image: Clinton Weaver
The first stage of the renovation, the family house, was built by the architects themselves. The four existing rooms of the chalet were reformulated and reordered, reversing the layout of the living spaces with those of the bedrooms to give an appearance to the public spaces and privacy to the sleeping spaces. The handcrafted details of these rooms reveal an intimacy between the architect-owner-builder and the structure of the house. The use of stained wood, leather, layered wall coverings, and multifaceted windows lend richness to these modestly scaled rooms. The framing of the beams is expressed decoratively, similar to joinery, to make walls, and finely crafted wooden screens mediate daylight and privacy. It’s a delightful reimagining of the qualities of a Queenslander, without being kitsch or shy. There’s an emphasis on comfort, light convenience, and airflow rather than bulk in this two-bedroom, one-bathroom home. The spaces are intimate, quirky and charming.
The living, kitchen and dining rooms are distinct from each other, but arranged as a row, rather than the all-in-one megaroom of the contemporary KiDiLi (Kitchen, Dining, Living) – a pejorative architectural term that was, I believe, the first implemented by seminal Brisbane architect Timothy Hill. The plan supports a feminist home, or what has now been redescribed as a post-COVID home: it makes it easier for partners to share supervision of children when they do chores or work from home, while also providing a degree of separation. and privacy between rooms.
Stained wood, expressed beam framing and layered wall coverings reimagine typical Queenslander details. Artworks (L – R): Josef Tockstein, Jitka Valova (on bench); Evan Hecox (black frame); Kat Shapiro Madeira; Susie Duggin.
Image: Clinton Weaver
In contrast, the upper back floor of the house and the lower floor studio, recently completed by a contractor, are more open, with greater connection to the backyard and neighborhood. While the home’s family rooms are rich in deep colors, soft furnishings, and smaller intimate spaces, the new dining room and study below have a white and gray palette, and a semi-outdoor, semi-public feel. Large sliding panels open across the entire eastern edge and make the dining space feel like a balcony. Protected but airy, full of light but in shadow, it offers the double sensation of being in the world and supported by the comfort of an articulated room. Cleverly planned views of the leafy neighborhood and children’s play area in the garden are glorious in their simplicity.
The ground-floor studio is made of concrete and stainless steel, a robust palette for this street-facing space.
Image: Clinton Weaver
While the dining room has the sensibility of a porch, the lower-level studio embraces the pleasing qualities of a traditional Queenslander basement. Huge stepped concrete slabs bury the space in the ground. It’s legal and protected. The floor plan provides a sense of refuge and passive control from within. The long northern edge of the house forms a rigid boundary with the trail, and therefore a stainless steel mesh screen and low-rise concrete wall are employed to mediate daylight and breezes, and to provide visibility and safety. from street. For visitors to the studio, a separate address is made along this edge. A colonnade is formed by the posts supporting the house above and the studio wall, and this loggia-like space signals a subtle demarcation between the studio’s semi-public address and the personal spaces of the house above.
A basin at the end of a hallway is adjacent to, but separate from, the bathroom’s wet areas.
Image: Clinton Weaver
Unlike the more common approach of extending older houses with a growing volume affixed to the back, here the new work was done within the footprint of the existing house. Galvanized steel posts and flashings, smooth concrete floors and walls, and roughly troweled plaster on concrete blocks express an aesthetic of utility and—unexpected to some—inherent charm in the material. It is the same sensibility, embodied in our common cultural taste by traditional Queenslanders, of the shadowy profile of the wooden floorboards, the repetitive rhythm of the VJ wall coverings and the variable grain of the wooden floorboards.
Red Hill House and Studio expresses and reinforces the values ​​of Zuzana and Nicholas’ architectural practice. Manifested spatially and materially, these twin values ​​enjoy the inherent cultural and typological qualities of the existing house, whilst inventively adapting them to suit contemporary lifestyles through sophisticated and well-crafted architectural thinking.
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