Hampton House

Alterations and additions projects are the bread and butter of residential practice.  This project involved dealing with a low quality Edwardian house requiring extensive additional accommodation.  The domestic program is conventional and the planning strategy employed uses a courtyard typology to impose hierarchy and order on a typically contingent Edwardian arrangement.  The project attains some distinction through its investigation of forms and materials which draw on a re-framed Edwardian aesthetic.

The project investigates the themes of Arts and Crafts design which can be related to the Edwardian house and also provide a parti for new forms which sit adjacent.  The forms accommodating the expanded program are generated by the limitations of siting and take in to account orientation and views on and off the site. Within these constraints, the architecture aims to resonate with the abstractions of domestic form generated by Voysey and Mackintosh and the building fabric is constructed utilising texture and detail in the tradition of both the Arts and Craft movement and Brutalism – movements which present a nexus of modernism and humanism.

"Kennedy Nolan’s work here shows a method for the rejuvenation of established suburbs that respects previous eras and remembers the personal histories embedded in individual houses, but does not seek to memorialize what has gone before. This Edwardian has been reinterpreted, not reiterated. Retailers of replica door knockers and the myriad other mass-market accoutrements of “heritage renovation” may well be disgruntled, but the rest of us should rejoice. After all, who would want to be ordinary when they can be extraordinary?"

Mark Scruby, Houses, August 2010