Architect Andrew Simpson's latest residential project has singular form

Always reliable to do the unreservedly original, architect Andrew Simpson’s latest residential project, behind a North Fitzroy terrace, has such singular form the question begs: what’s that extraordinary roof shape about, if it is not hiding an upper level?

If you took a few steps further back and saw the new roofline in context with the Victorian-era house, you’d see it as Simpson does:

“It’s a pitch that mirrors the roof pitch of the old house, a cantilevered pitch that protects the deck”.

If you took a few steps into the new pavilion spaces that have such a lavishing of cedar lining tracing an equally unusual above-head structure, you’d see them as giant periscopes of light and multiple outlooks to sky and borrowed greenery “which is the canopy of the mature tree that grows next door”.

The acute, up-kicking other roof pitch is not there as wanton decoration. It, too, has function as a thermal chimney to void heat out of the rooms and as the source of daylight that kisses the rear cedar wall. “A skylight runs the whole length of it and the light changes as the sun tracks across the sky.”

The wide deck and the new kitchen/living rooms are raised high on an uncommonly large block for the inner city, “as if it were on a hill”, Simpson explains. This reflects the client couple’s love of Tuscan hilltop villages “and gives longer views into the courtyards”.

As with the option of creating multiple courtyards, everything about this project is generous: from the scale of a worn-out house that was so lovingly restored, through the materiality of the new addition that preferred natural substances such as charred Silvertop Ash cladding, cedar lining timbers and American oak boards and limestone tiles underfoot for the patinas they will develop over time. “And because they are great to the touch.”

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Everything about a project that took three and a half years from the clients finding themselves able to buy a house they’d been eyeing off for years, was a group effort by top-line design and building professionals recruited by Simpson, “because working with colleagues is the part of the process I enjoy the most”.

As usual, Overend Constructions did masterclass-level carpentry and cabinetry. Renata Fairhall’s landscaping will increasingly soften the strong structural definition. Simone Haag did the easy-living, loose furniture and interiors styling.

Allowing a daring architect such as Simpson free reign is to the credit of the clients. And in turn, that he did the same for his fellow creatives is just part of what creates such a one-off building.

The main ingredient to that end, he tells, is always based on the origin story of the clients: “When we start any project, we ask about them, about where they grew up, what books and films and art they love?

“We try to get a real understanding of them so that what we do is not an architectural imposition but comes out of a conversation about what they are attracted to”.