Black Rock House | Patrick Jost

The Black Rock House is an addition to a dilapidated existing residential dwelling. The client’s brief was to retain the front part of the house and add a two story extension to the rear. “As the house was fronted on to a side street and the site ran adjacent to a main road we built hard against the side boundary on the road all the way to the rear of the site. This was to separate the backyard from the unwanted traffic noise and provide better privacy to the rear yard. We exceeded the standard planning setbacks in order to do this and justified this with the creation of a better quality outdoor area. We also used a number of different materials and finishes in different planes on the façade to reduce the perceived visual bulk to the street” says the architect, Patrick Jost. Conceptually, the new area of the house is visually connected back to the existing house by folding the old roof up in a “reverse pitch” and racking it across to the new flat roof of the addition and folding the fascia down again at the rear. Jost adds, “This eliminates the issue of having a new boxy element that has no relation to the existing house”. Internally, light coloured natural finishes and operable glazed sliders that open out to a flush finished timber deck, small pool and rear yard associate the house with the beachside suburb it is located in. As part of part of standard design principals in the office relating to sustainable design, the layout and façade treatment is orientated to respond to basic passive thermal design, reduced glazing to the upper, west facing façade and set back glazing on the ground floor decreases sunlight penetration during summer and allow it in during winter. The whole job was done as a design and construct process where Philip Building Group, the builder, and Jost Architects worked closely together on coming up with innovative scheme that had a closely controlled budget. The overall design successfully meshed together the old and new elements of a building to create a bright and comfortable family home.