Verandah Terraces

2019 - 2023

State EmAGN Project Award, RAIA Queensland Architecture Awards, 2024

State Commendation for Residential Architecture - Houses (Alterations and Additions), RAIA Queensland Architecture Awards, 2024

Regional Commendation, RAIA Brisbane Regional Architecture Awards, 2024

Verandah Terraces is a contemporary annexure to a rare 1890’s 4-room Queenslander cottage, embedded in the ‘timber and tin’ enclave of Petrie Terrace. The cottage navigates the local typography like an iceberg, with a single-storey presented to its principal street address and 3 storeys draping down to the rear laneway.    

 Architecture is the chronological ledger of our Cities, respecting each age which contributes to the framework of additive architecture is critical. Our instructions were to retain the integrity of the rudimentary structure, our intentions were to learn from its implicit knowledge and impart its sensibilities into our own response, with regards to scale, materiality and assemblage.

Our strategy towards program has been to utilise the existing internal rooms of the cottage as the required ‘interiors’ to the brief and introduce a counterpoint of open living platforms or ‘terraces’ to the Site, avoiding demolition or expansion of the core and clearly delineating between the two ages of the house.

The new additions are confined to a small footprint and stacked against the eastern boundary, preserving an open landscape and maintaining a view back to the original elevation from the laneway. The central nave of the cottage has been extended to link each terrace to the plan, bridging across a steel pinwheel stair, which acts as a structural lynchpin and provides vertical connection from street to lane. Each terrace introduces a complimentary program and significant territory to the existing level which is placed within the view and participates in the great borrow of space and texture over the rear laneway and surrounding suburb.

Problematically, the preferred aspect and broadest elevation align to the West. A retractable two-storey hardwood screen wall curtains and shields against the afternoon summer sun but welcomes in the view at other times of the day and year. An engawa space is experienced as a grand cavity within the layered construction of the western wall. The daily delight of the chiaroscuro effect of light sieved through the screen was anticipated in our earliest drawings and models. A seminal lesson of reinvesting architecture to condition space through strictly passive means was inspired by a humble Butcher’s Van at the Tenterfield Rail Museum.

There is an immediacy to the structural legibility of the recycled hardwood timber frame and expressed tectonics. A build that demonstrates and celebrates its own making and crafting. The architecture has been enabled by astute engineering and dedicated craftspeople and our Clients who have carried and cared for the project throughout its journey.

Verandah Terraces has made the periphery of the original house into the imperative of the new additions. Verandahs were local adaptations, introduced to temper the climate and protect the Georgian core of early colonial buildings. Verandahs are now appreciated as liminal spaces, mediating the contrasting conditions of exterior and interior, their interface with the elements creating a poetic and particular experience of place. The verandah defines a specific cultural condition which we, as a Practice, advocate as the appropriate platform for living in the City.  

Builders: Cross Builders | Greg Thornton Constructions

Photography: Christopher Frederick Jones

Project Team: Paul Hotston & Alice Langholt

Model: Kento Nagao