Renovation

What began as a modest brief for a young and growing family soon evolved into a considered renovation that reimagines an existing Barwon Heads home. The original house had endured several unsympathetic alterations over the years, leaving it disjointed and built to a poor standard.

The rehabilitation project of Casa P. Colina is based on a regenerative view of architecture, understood as a process of transformation that reconciles the natural, the built, and the existing. Rather than replacing, the intervention rewrites the house from its own material, integrating structures, materials, and memories as active components of the new spatial system. Nature ceases to be a backdrop and incorporates itself as a constitutive dimension of dwelling.

A renovation for another level, this addition utilises the existing steel structure to elevate two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a garden above the low-lying existing single-storey house. Responding to the expressed client brief for space, light, and air, the additional level breathes new life into the tight site without inhibiting views out across the neighbouring rooftops. Set around a multi-faceted highlight window detail, the new spaces are given the air they deserve, providing the family with a new dimension of liveability while minimising the destruction and waste of the existing building.