99 Yarranabbe Road, Darling Point

Winner - Category A – Heritage items

Category: A. Heritage items
Architect: Andrew Burges Architects
Heritage consultant: John Oultram Heritage Design
Builder: A.N.T. Building

Design statement

99 Yarranabbe Road is an unusual and interesting example of an Inter War, Functionalist style house built in 1938 by Joan Nisbet and her husband the architect John Athelstan Victor Nisbet, who designed the house based on the SunSpan Exhibition House of 1935 by the well-known English modernist architect, Wells Coates.

The brief for our renovation at 99 Yarranabbe Road was for an expansion of the footprint to increase the amenity of the existing house to contain 3 bedrooms with ensuites, a bathroom, and enlarged living and dining spaces.

Our strategy for increasing the area of the dwelling was to increase the living space of the ground floor level by extending into the existing garage area, and propose a separate and distinct rooftop pavilion that would provide a third level of floor area while allowing the original footprint and masonry walls of the house to be retained intact.

To increase the perception of space within the tight footprint of the existing levels, we grouped as many functions as we could in a tight core around a rebuilt stair, allowing the full length of the periphery walls to be revealed on the interior, increasing the scale of each room. The circulation between levels was rebuilt with a stair winding around the original staircase, with tightly curved walls peeling away to draw light and open up views to the sky from within the central core of the house’s interior.

External works was limited to replacing the existing paving to a recycled brick that complemented the original façade, and the reconstruction of the boundary fence and new steel gate in a manner that is complementary to the original inter war functionalist building.