Merrilands

Merrilands is a house cut from a different cloth.

Named to memorialise an ancestral homestead in rural north-west Victoria and acknowledge the Merri-bek Creek nearby, the design threads together storiesdrawn from family history, place, and personal journeys.

Our clients, a busy family of four, asked Bijl Architecture to create a purposeful, flexible and sustainable home, while exploring the site’s untappedopportunities. In making their new home truly accommodating to extended family, friends and guests, our clients also requested we provide for making,crafting and leisure pastimes balanced by a clear demarcation of active and quiet spaces.

With heritage overlay restrictions and local flooding issues affecting the property, the original brick cottage also came with serious building defects and aclunky 1990s addition. By unpicking the floor plan, rethinking the defunct backyard garage, making better use of the left-over spaces - all while respectingand revitalising the mature landscaping elements in the front and rear gardens - and establishing a through access to the disconnected rear laneway, ourdesign has given the 100+ year old dwelling a completely new lease of life.

A clear agenda of resilience and heritage sensitivity has brought about a unified, integrated design outcome - significant focus has been placed on thermalmassing, low embodied energy materials, passive design strategies, natural ventilation and the use of low maintenance materials to manage the life cyclecost of the project.

Material patterns and light shifts create unexpected moments throughout - an overhead walkway connects the studio addition atop the rebuilt garage.Circulation spaces become reading nooks, anterooms, places to retreat, the mature rear garden connecting internal and external living spaces with the multi-functional garage. These moments - and so much more - add up to making Merrilands a home of everyday potential, curiosity and great delight.