The great save: An 1800s Bendigo cottage rescued from the too-hard basket

They were the fast-build houses of Victoria’s 1850s gold rush population explosion. Small, wooden and gabled, once they were everywhere in Melbourne’s working class inner suburbs but the land on which they stood became too valuable and they were too easy to erase.

They’re still in place in country towns and on farms, often unaltered and unoccupied and, after 150 years or so, usually sloping toward ruin. If fixed up, they’re all charm and cosiness on a minor scale.

Ten years ago in an elevated street close to Bendigo’s commercial centre, relocating architectural couple Rachel Hannan and Rim Martin of e+architecture, bought such a four-room cottage on a 420-square metre block.

It had two gables and, says Martin, “no heritage overlay. Because of the state of the house a lot of people would have bulldozed it.” Its age is nebulous but the first rates notice was dated 1895.

Wanting more room when the two children arrived, an initial plan for a rear extension proposed digging deep to build two storeys. “But in model,” says Hannan, “that looked really dominant. All wrong. Furiously heavy.”

Plan two for a full-width kitchen/dining room extension proposed to drop the floor level by 850 centimetres from the original Baltic pine boards of the cottage to create living areas with good lateral and overhead volume and a two-part floor plate.

In actualised form, that turns out to be a terrific model for how to sympathetically expand a miner’s cottage without damaging its appealing external silhouette.

The third new gable matches the elevations of the first two and, while the charred Cypress pine clad addition is very slightly skewed – “spun to give us more northerly exposure”, Martin explains, “it creates a really interesting geometry” to the two-bedroom, one-bathroom family home.

Requiring a minimalist and disciplined lifestyle, there is nevertheless undoubted luxury touches in the addition’s four-metre head height and in the thick wooden kitchen bench fashioned from laminated timbers taken from old St Kilda Pier. A lowered slab of marble elongates the long all-purpose bench even more.

Rim Martin says Miner’s Cottage” remains “a work in progress” and that in a sloping backyard being landscaped “as a series of small spaces that allows many things to happen”, the next phase will add a separate backyard annexe “of loft bedroom, sitting room and bathroom”.

From the front it reads as an authentic and respected little cottage, humble indeed but a winner if for no other reason than it has been so lovingly retrieved from where so many people had been so willing to put it: “The too hard basket.”