![]() Plus, they barely take up any space and are easy to transport, so buying a good floor lamp is always a sound investment. Not only does a floor lamp have the unique ability to emit light in the hardest of places (like the middle of the room), but its slim silhouette can also add tons of visual interest. For example, a bad lighting scheme can produce harsh shadows, making a space feel smaller, whereas a good lighting scheme can highlight all the right places and help the eye travel throughout the room, making it seem more spacious.Īll this is to say: Lighting should be at the forefront of your decorating plan! And one of the biggest assets to a solid lighting scheme is a good old floor lamp. (Although we do really love lamps.) There is actually expert-backed evidence that the way your home is lit can affect how you perceive it and ultimately feel about it. And that’s not just our personal opinion. That’s where lighting comes in, because when intentionally placed in the right spaces around the house, it can actually elevate the look of your decor. You start with the essentials-sofa, rug, coffee table-that you think will make the most impact, but then you take a look around and the room still appears kind of dull. Instead, it revels in elaborating, heightening, echoing, counterpointing, dramatizing and reframing the fabric as found, thereby continuing the narrative that has accreted in our heritage building stock.Lighting tends to be an afterthought in the decorating process. Like all good responses to heritage houses, Clare Cousin Architects’ Fitzroy North Terrace is not merely an act of preserving, akin to pickling a specimen or applying a new layer of varnish and then appending something alien to it. Echoes of gardens past are present, however, in the inclusion of a productive roof garden and utility room within this folly-cum-shed. Instead, gardens have become picturesque compositions, as is the case at this house – even complete with a folly-like structure at the garden’s end, aping the gestures of the house in miniature. Typically, outdoor spaces are no longer productive domains or sites of intensive domestic labour and, thus, the kitchen and other utilities have been unanchored from them. However, it also manifests our changing relation to the garden. ![]() It expresses a contemporary desire to grant living rooms prime lighting and outlook, and to bring kitchens into the heart of the home. This is, again, a near ubiquitous alteration in older houses. ![]() Perhaps this disposition served it more appropriately over the past century, when it hosted not only nuclear families, but also households of boarders, lodgers and sharing friends, as well as “indisposed women” in its brief moment as St Michael’s Hospital during its first decades.Īt the ground floor, reconfigurations consist of an exchange in position between the kitchen and rear living room. It replaces a subtler order that once defined the principal bedroom simply by virtue of its size and position. This configuration, ubiquitous and unquestioned in contemporary Australian housing, ossifies the hierarchies of the nuclear family. At a smaller scale, however, these alterations import a kind of hierarchy that did not exist when the house was first built: the definition of a “master suite” (now, less problematically, often termed the “main suite”), made qualitatively different from other bedrooms by the provision of an ensuite bathroom exclusively for this bedroom’s occupants. The reconfigurations of the upper floor leave the house, at the large scale, rather unchanged – it remains a series of bedrooms and bathrooms off a corridor. ![]() The form, however, is uniquely its own: an incredibly robust (perhaps even fortified) language of simple geometries, narrow openings and deep thresholds. ![]() The contrasting materiality of the red-brick addition emphasizes the break between old and new, and is immediately recognizable as the material language of surrounding single-storey dwellings. The visible ends of the ties that stabilize this original facade look almost patera-like, tidily positioned along the mouldings in a way that seems plausibly intentional but unconventional – perfectly appropriate for this off-kilter composition. The renovation to the rear pulls away from the existing facade, which is left standing almost independently and reading as a partly dislocated, ornamented, delicate plane shielding a heavy mass – heightening its already existing peculiarities. It is also at this enigmatic front-ish-but-also-side-ish facade that the interventions made by Clare Cousins Architects are first evident. A utility space at the rear of the site is directly accessed from the side street. ![]()
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