Renovation: Charmed by the old way of doing things

It’s an architect’s home, so what have we come to expect of a self-authored renovation for family occupancy?

The usual? Old rooms ripped to bits or removed completely to be replaced by bigger, contemporary spaces and myriad flashy inventions under bright illumination?

Robert Simeoni, who can do all of the above with one hand tied behind his back, resisted such urges when it came to revising a time-weathered 1888 “good and ordinary” Victorian terrace in Carlton.

Although he had expert tradies crawling over the three-bedroom house, he explains his intention as “retaining an incredibly intact house and not altering it as much as I possibly could”.

Of course, he did alter some areas, such as the stainless-steel kitchen, introducing the lovely internal shutter and sheer curtain story in the bedrooms and making the old lean-to downstairs dunny accessible from the house while losing none of its quaintness as a presence in the brick-paved yard, where it makes a familiar coupling with the gully trap.

The point of the exercise was that, apart from restoration and repair using traditional material, such as lime cement, Simeoni wanted to “retain the original functions of the rooms because I enjoyed the transitions from one space to another”.

“We didn’t want to lose the quiet quality of the spaces as they existed. And living in the house, I find those qualities to be quite peaceful.”

Instead of having the rear of the house made more open to the yard by widening the kitchen portal, Simeoni preferred to keep the opening as it was. “So there are no places of light shock and the mystery is retained,” he says.

What has been preserved throughout is a wonderful quality of muted light and shade. In the old rooms and hallways, “light is always soft and it penetrates into the building with a lovely grace”.

From the outside, where the facade render is flaking and craquelled and the brickwork on the side lane with the window situations appear as they ever were, it can seem as if nothing has taken place.

“But a lot has happened,” says the architect. “It’s just not evident at first glance.”

You can look at the dunny as evidence of this. The funny old diamond of removed bricks that operated as ventilation has been left because Simeoni finds “the gesture absolutely intriguing”.To play it up, he’s made a crux-shaped window on a hinge that can be closed to keep out the weather when necessary.

It’s another evocation off a perverse ethos of touching a dear old house “as lightly as possible”.