Dreamcatcher House

Well Woven

Four growing children helped sway a decision by Fiona Winzar and her husband to seek more living room for their family. She spied an opportunity in a 1980s brick town house in South Melbourne that she briefly considered demolishing, before settling on retaining the original building’s shell and morphing new steel additions onto it.

“That clinker-brick almost seemed a bit brutal,” says Winzar. “We decided to employ a lightweight steel structure with some timber as a foil. We have structural steel studs to the double-height entry space and a series of steel portal frames  for the top floor living level, allowing us to keep the new walls slim.” The shell of the old town house was recycled for the ground floor self-contained studio and middle sleeping floor.

Externally, galvanised 75mm x 75mm SHS is used to support the top floor deck as well as the Ronstan Tensile Architecture-supplied Carl Stahl X-TEND^® stainless steel cable mesh, which provides a scaffold for vines to climb. The permeable steel mesh curtain is carefully sculpted around the exposed exterior framing to the north-facing top deck and lower courtyard.

Designed to carry up to two tonnes of ‘green ’ weight, the mesh already has tendrils of ornamental grape and will soon envelop this unusual street facade. The resulting green screen will eventually protect the house’s northern face from summer sun, yet allow winter sun to penetrate.

Winzar says she took her inspiration for the mesh screen from the original lattice porch of the Victorian weatherboard residence which was once on the site but was demolished before heritage controls were put in place. “Because our plantings are quite new, our house feels a bit nude at the moment but we know that in a couple of years it will be dressed in a nice green coat.”

In a nod to the light industrial fabric of the area, Winzar deliberately chose raw construction materials for the project, largely sticking with the theme of galvanised steel which extends to balustrades, downpipes, roller-door and – on the eastern and southern facades – liberal amounts of 51mm SPEEDPANEL^® wall cladding made from galvanised steel.

We selected that cladding for its finish and although it’s lightweight, it is stiff and strong because of the aerated concrete inside it. It comes in super-long lengths, up to nine metres, which a couple of installers can handle and install from inside the site which was beneficial because we had very limited exterior access.”

Although once an ugly duckling of the street, Winzar denies the house is now a pretty swan. “I wouldn’t call it a pretty house. I think it’s interesting but it’s unusual and unexpected so therefore can be somewhat confronting. “I think that there’s a lightness and elegance in the mesh structure that is quite feminine. I’m really happy with the fact that it has a very fine and slender look and it helps the whole expression to be relatively understated. It’s not heroic but it’s not conservative, either. Maybe that’s a bit of me in there.”