Alma House

Our Alma House project sits on the land of the Wurundjeri people, who have been the traditional custodians of this area for generations.

The brief was clear from the start: a family home for the long haul. Relaxed, personal, nothing fussy or formal. The clients had been in their 1920s California bungalow in Williamstown long enough to know what wasn’t working, and what they didn’t want to lose. The street presence, the original Baltic pine floors, the arched hallway. What they needed was more: a kitchen that opened to the garden, a proper living space, room for kids to spread out, a pool.

The heritage overlay on the existing cottage complicated the obvious approach. Cutting the rear roofline to absorb a new addition wasn’t permitted; the existing form had to remain intact. What emerged from that constraint was something more considered than a straightforward integration would have produced. The new addition, clad in radial-sawn silvertop ash shiplap with a gabled corrugated iron roof, sits behind and beside the original cottage as a distinct volume. But inside, the house doesn’t read that way. A lower ceiling, light coming from both sides, a change underfoot from Baltic pine to bluestone: the junction between old and new is there if you look for it, but it doesn’t dominate. The two parts of the house meet rather than announce themselves.

The result is a 200sqm home built around the life the clients described: cooking on the terrace, kids in the attic, friends around the pool and outdoor fireplace on a Williamstown Saturday. The house is fully electric, with gas abolished, 9.84kW of solar, heat pump hot water and pool heating, and a natural pool with no chlorination. The existing evaporative cooling was retained and modified rather than replaced. These weren’t afterthoughts; sustainability was in the brief from the first email.