How to restore a modernist home respectfully, with architect John Alkemade

In this time of wholesale destroy and replace development it’s invariably a relief when an owner opts to mend and amend a worthy original.

Saving a mid-century Black Rock home, admittedly with disastrous westerly orientation and scars from earlier extensions, was option one and local architect John Alkemade did his best with some early concept plans.

But when he showed the owners the potential price of such remediation, they went away and had a long rethink before agreeing to his alternate proposal for a new build that took full advantage of a large block tucked into an old sand dune.

The three-bedroom house that came out of the ground is such a respectful acknowledgement of all that was so lifestyle-suitable in classic Antipodean modernism – especially with a double skillion-roofed frontage that, as Alkemade agrees, “could have been done in the ’50s”, that it won two awards in last year’s Bayside Built Environment Awards including the Best of the Best nomination.

Stepping up to a timber-faced double level at the rear, which gives two teenage boys their own sector of two upstairs bedrooms and a downstairs rumpus area, and stepping sideways in a sequence of slip-back sections down the descending block – from the front master suite through the central living/kitchen/dining to boy’s zone, Black Rock House becomes more contemporary as it moves through.

The sharp, black-framed glazing which includes clerestory windows are, says the architect, “so you look out and up and not into fences”. The dark cabinetry and roofing, incorporating an almost fly-tent sheet canopy rising above the kitchen, is classy design.

But always this residence stays on the right side of exhibitionism opting instead to be so apt to its situation that it is the house that looks most at home in the neighbourhood.

“Reflecting its context that in Beaumaris-style, mid-century is a simple housing form that is informal, relaxed and beachy, this fits,” says Alkemade.

The bagged brick pillar on the frontage is mimicking a chimney “so typical of old Beaumaris”. And moving from the outside to inside are other modernist touches such as a run of rock walling and a longer stretch of vertical timber Silvertop ash. “The classic materials”, says the architect, “that gave those old houses real character and beauty”.

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