The brief was the one we hear most often in the older northern suburbs: a house that works perfectly well room by room, and not at all as a whole. Three small spaces at the back, each with its own door, and a kitchen facing away from the garden.
We took the rear wall out and replaced it with a double-volume opening onto a new deck. The structure is a steel portal frame carrying the upper floor, which let us avoid a column in the middle of the new living space.
The work ran fourteen weeks from site handover, three days inside the programme we set at drawing stage. The owners stayed in the house throughout, which shaped the sequencing more than anything else on the drawings.