Restoration

It is not necessary to create a world, but the possibility of a world, Jean-Luc Godard em Reflexivity in Film and Architecture, 1985.

Originally part of the 1920’s Durrell’s Estate in Lilyfield, Sydney’s Inner West, the original freestanding brick workers cottage was purchased with a mere 3£ deposit. The house had since been victim to neglect and a series of questionable improvements over the course of its life. It had been stripped of its ornate detail and added to with an asbestos lean-too infill, enclosing and eroding the logic and simplicity of the original cottage’s plan.

The project consists in the readjustment of an old house in a bakery, totaling 240 m2 of built area.

Once there was a vineyard with a small, unremarkable, and partially ruined farmer house built on it.
In spite of the modest origins of its construction we decided to conserve its picturesque looks. Its irregular openings where maintained adding all but one larger window looking curiously up the street.

It was probably a few hours after the “Grândola Vila Morena”1 by Zeca Afonso, echoed on the telephony, the 2nd ‘password-song’ of a revolution that would free Portugal from a dictatorial regime, on 25 April 1974, that a journey which had begun a few months earlier was abruptly interrupted. The construction site was abandoned that same day, becoming a kind of contemporary ruin of an anonymous residential building. 42 years later the process was retaken, redefining a new journey to turn this peculiar lot into a House – Atelier.