Byford House
A dogtrot home on a semi-rural block in Byford
Models








Drawings



Summary
The project is located in the original Rockingham townsite area, near the City’s first church and meters from the Indian Ocean.
An architect, his wife and their young child lived in a small one bedroom cottage on the property for close to a decade before electing to build a new home. The existing house, a transplanted Goldfields cottage, was approaching the end of its second lifespan and proved economically unviable to restore.
Existing Cottage
The brief demanded a comfortable, well-performing house that connected new interiors to an existing mature garden. Particularly joyous qualities of the original cottage were to inform a small and cost-effective new home.
Neighbouring houses utilising their recent re-zoning as high-density (R-AC) imposed overlooking concerns. The lots 45-degree orientation to north made conventional siting & shading strategies difficult.
Context Model
The project's design phases coincided with our teaching of a UWA design studio that was exploring the phenomenon of international influence. Following a similar line of inquiry to that of the studio, the house developed as an assemblage of local and international ideas.
The work of Kazuo Shinohara and Alberto Campo Baeza became particularly important to the project’s development, as well as several of the surrounding 1950’s beach shacks.
A compact square house with a deep floor plan emerged in response to the site's challenges and fiscal constraints. A basic nine-square grid establishes order within the mass.
Whilst we sought to be spatially playful, other inherent obligations of a contemporary architect were not discarded. The house adopts several low-tech solutions - maximizing natural cross-ventilation and managing solar gain throughout.
Student Brief
After a rough arrangement was ascertained we primarily developed the project through large scale physical models. A 1:25 scale working model was a quick and effective device to explore spaces, openings and junctions. The majority of the homes 2-dimensional drawings were then rear-loaded into the later project stages.
Our approach to detail and material is simple. A slab on ground with timber framed walls and roof.
This is the first residential project for which we are attempting to calculate embodied carbon, a first step towards setting internal benchmarking for future work.
The project is currently in the Documentation Phase and is due to be constructed in 2026.
Working detail model
Information
Rockingham
Private
2024 -
Construction Documentation
New Home
177m²
Full Services
City
Client
Year
Status
Type
Size
Services
Sion Bourne, Basim Boulos
Team