Curvy Cottage
Caroline Hyett Gardens & Design
This extends ESD benefits beyond human inhabitants and extended family to their more-than-human kin and an inner-west community embracing joyful exemplars like this.
The clients’ excellence with colour, form and texture helped realise the design vision. Warm neutral interiors of Blackbutt joinery, prefinished-lightweight-timber ceilings and concrete floors highlight their curated collections and artwork.
The couple collaborated easefully with designers on materiality from tiles to terrazzo, infusing playful bathrooms and walk-in-robes with their gardens’ soft pinks, lush greens and sky-blues.
Misha & Craig
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Curvy Cottage provides a breath of fresh air in gritty Yarraville. An unconventional addition to a tiny heritage cottage, its an expansive sanctuary awash with colour, light, and more-than-human life.
Curvy Cottage provides a breath of fresh air in gritty Yarraville. An unconventional addition to a tiny heritage cottage, its an expansive sanctuary awash with colour, light, and more-than-human life. Its rooftop garden provides an inner-city oasis for a creative couple, addressing the urban-heat-island-effect with biodiverse habitat and urban greening.
Nature-loving clients craved garden views from every room and separate retreats for themselves and family from Aotearoa/NZ, who stay regularly and hate imposing. Keen travellers, their liberatingly-personal brief included: a ply-lined working-from-home space reminiscent of NZ’s tramping cabins; generous gardens and volumes; and a contemporary rear insertion “unafraid to incorporate color, shape and texture, and designed to play with light and height”.
BCA restored the front two rooms of the sweet, dilapidated cottage, bringing natural light and animating garden colour deep into the plan with a double-height, charred-timber addition and central courtyard-garden. Spatial planning carefully defines ground-floor living, Work-from-home and guest zones and a top-floor retreat.
This high-contrast insertion optimises the width of a shallow, north-facing site. It’s set in sensitively from neighbouring properties and softened by elegant curves – in cross-section and plan – lending interiors comfort and flow.
The retreat opens to a roof-deck offering expansive views across Melbourne’s west, which brings exquisite natural light flowing down the staircase deep into the interior. It links to Caroline Hyett Garden Design’s roof-garden, teaming with biodiverse life.
This provides precisely the spontaneous barefoot gardening and restorative moments of reflection the intentional couple sought. The roof-garden also filters rainwater, minimises stormwater, and adds thermal-mass to a high-performing home. Passive design prioritises sunlight and operable shading. The clients’ artworks, collections and confidence with materiality elevate the interior’s restrained warmth.
Their astute contributions, from curved tiles to botanical wallpaper and terrazzo floors rich in garden colour, help integrate house-and-garden, embedding their distinctive aesthetics and playfulness.
