Here's what you can do with your old sleep-out: Reinventing the balcony

In adding a new upstairs bedroom to a Victorian-era corner terrace on a busy Newtown thoroughfare in inner Sydney, Jo Bastian has restored multiple uses to a space that had become a memory of the way our grand- or great-grandparents used to inhabit their houses.

On a project she called “The Balcony”, the architect instated a room of such various functionalities that it is all at once a bedroom with a tree canopy outlook, a big comfortable balcony and a sleep-out.

At the same time, it’s a room with the contemporised atmosphere of “the amazing colonial balconies that were sheltered outdoor rooms” that she so admired during her childhood in Singapore.

Cantilevering out over the long-side and rear of a building that might, she wonders, have operated as a corner shop, the new bedroom that can be fairly well screened for privacy or opened up for conversation with its community, and “has a bigger agenda of bringing the house back into society”.

“On a house set between two railway stations on a street that runs down to a public school,” she says, “there are always people walking by and always people stopping and having conversations. By opening this balcony, it can re-engage with the street and not turn away.”

The vertical spotted gum battens that make a dense balustrade on the lower section and that, above, are spaced 60 millimetres apart, are the material of moveable screens that can be peeled back from the corner and folded back from two window-scaled openings to deliver a level of concealment or conviviality for the occupants.

Bastian says for the passing public the house seems to automatically elicit an engagement.

Prompted by either nostalgia or the admiration of a welcome readaptation of a good idea, “it is a conversation piece on the street. People stop and look and take photos of it, so it is having a conversation of its own.”

Facing west and in a suburb that can be a bit breathless in high summer, when the floor-to-ceiling glass doors that sit just behind the screens are open it affords “the benefit of any breezes that are available”. On hot nights, therefore, the 23-square-metre bedroom-as-balcony works like an old-time wire room or sleep-out.

Also resulting from the westerly orientation, “the battens create a basket-weave of amazing shadows in the room,” the architect says. “Because the patterns change throughout the day you cannot ignore the outside world. The sunsets can be amazing too.”

For all of the different capabilities and the changing light and shade effects, “the atmosphere of the room,” she says, “is very calm because you can look out into the treetops. And even [with the glass doors open] when you can see and hear the suburb, you can remain secluded. 

“It is a room that can feel like a balcony but one that is very sheltering.”