CASA31_4 Room House

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: Architect-owners Caroline di Costa and Adrian Iredale worked with the two other parnters in Iredale Pedersen Hook (IPH) on a four-year renovation and extension of their 1936 Queen Anne Federation House in Perth. CASA31_4 Room House is the result. The original house appears untouched from the front while the extension at the back is extrovert, complex and challenging. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: This renovation is as much about expressing spatial, emotional, historical and political ideas as it is about creating more room for a family. The four new rooms are: a room the the sky; a room to the interior; a room to the garden; and a room to the horizon. The new rooms literally preserve and reinterpret the past - a former roof becomes a floor, roof tiles become a musical score on a fence, a grandmother's old sliding door becomes an amber stained glass window - and create new connections with the site itself. The 'horizon' room' is cooled with a mechanism that reinterprets the 19th century 'Coolgardie Safe' a low-tech refrigeration system used by Western Australian miners. The project extends IPH's exploration of sustainability and with buildings that enhance the cultural, social and spiritual concerns of their inhabitants. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: CASA31_4 Room House was recognised twice in Australian Institute of Architects Western Australia chapter awards (2014). It won the Sustainable Architecture Award and it was commended in the Small Project Architecture Awards category. It won the Residential Best of Category award, International Interior Design Association (2013) Global Excellence Awards and the Best of State Awards (WA) for Residential Design at the Australian Interior Design Awards 2014. The project has been published on the cover of News Limited's weekend Home magazine (9 Feb 2014); magazine (17 April 2014); and Designboom architecture (14 April 2014).