Location: St Patricks Estate, Manly, NSW
Date Completed: October 2010
Photography: Brett Boardman

This project is situated within the St Patricks Estate at Manly on Sydney’s northern beaches. The clients brief required seven high quality contemporary terrace houses, to provide housing choice within a residential precinct comprised essentially of large free-standing dwellings. A key requirement of the brief was to devise a strategy that articulated the larger potential mass of seven connected dwellings into a residential form and scale consistent with the detached dwellings in the surrounding residential environment.

This was achieved by consolidating most of each houses internal program into one elongated primary element, with a smaller compositional piece deeply setback into the spaces between each of the primary forms. The primary elements are wedge-shaped in plan, in response to careful view analysis that shifted the frontage of the dwellings towards the arc of beaches and headlands stretching away to the north. This strategy integrated well with the internal program requirements, in that it created larger indoor and outdoor living spaces at the wider ends of the wedge whilst service functions requiring less space were planned into the thinner end of the wedge form. Each dwelling has its primary living area and master bedroom suite situated on the upper level, to provide optimised outlook over lower existing dwellings to the spectacular view along Sydney’s northern coastline. The planning on each level has been carefully devised to provide a sense of visual transparency from the rear of each dwelling. A rear courtyard is overlooked from an upper level flexible indoor/outdoor Kitchen space in each dwelling.
The building facades are diversified by reversal of the plan and utilisation of two different architectural expressions applied to a consistent floor plan. This is further re-inforced by a wide palette of external materials.