Annandale cottage renovation features five types of brick

In her first commission since graduating, Jo Bastian was asked by those unsung champions of young architects, her parents, to renovate their investment property, a typical 4.5-metre-wide, two-bedroom Annandale worker’s cottage.

In the typical first move of ripping off rickety back rooms, she unearthed and chose to retain one artefact of a ’70s renovation.

“There was an existing brick wall made of recycled bricks that I really liked,” she says. Bastian took a photograph of the “mixed bunch” brickwork comprised of raw, random and occasionally painted bricks to a specialist Smithfield recycling yard.

The folks at The Brick Pit recognised and matched the batch and the main theme of the renewed little house was established. Brick appears in five different places and variations in the addition and the outdoor room, the much-used courtyard beyond the sliding glass doors.

As well as extending that idiosyncratic kitchen wall through the living/dining extension, in front of it she added a white-painted brick plinth that is the foundation of the kitchen bench, then “snakes” as a solid dado along the wall, “where it can support a television”, she says. It ends up in the backyard, where it becomes a barbecue stand: “The all-important barbecue”.

The courtyard has a brick floor and is bounded along a side lane with what the architect terms “a hit and miss” wall of regular openings “that allow you to see the laneway behind, give the courtyard extra width and allow you to put T-lights into the gaps”.

A further brick feature is a low seating bench. “Every brick feature is doing a job and how it is laid distinguishes what it is doing,” Bastian says.

Managing all the different brick as a satisfying scheme reflects Bastian’s day job of working at one of Sydney’s top architectural practices, where she has been learning the supreme importance of detailing.

For instance, the exposed black steel structure framing the bays of the mixed bunch wall, and the north facing windows above, conceal LED lighting “that washes down the bricks”. Painting the dado brickwork white “was to tone it all down.

“In a really small project the more you detail, the busier it can become and the smaller it can feel. So yes, there is a lot of brick here, used in the five ways. But it is one material and that gives it cohesion.”

The solidity of the brick also implies an insulating sense of privacy. “The living room is the brightest room in the house. Through those windows it gets sunshine all day. But it also feels incredibly private.”