Escape from the Big House: The small Sydney tree home saved from knock-down rebuild

Other than stickybeaks idling in cars outside, Peter Muller (jnr) didn’t realise how unusual it was to grow up in a house famous for having a large tree branch growing in the living room.

Designed by his late father in the 1950s, the experimental modern architect of the same name, the Muller family home at Palm Beach on Sydney’s northern beaches was later savaged in a brutal renovation that fuelled the late architect’s passion that future changes should respect the legacy of the original designer.

Architect Belinda Koopman with home owners Ellen and Gary Smith at the renovated Trilogy House.Credit: Wolter Peeters

That legacy lives on in a nearby house. Another Muller-designed home that also had access holes for trees in the concrete slab and the roof has been saved from a knockdown-rebuild, which would have resulted in what architect Belinda Koopman described as yet another northern beaches mansion.

“My father was determined not to chop down trees. They had to stay, and branches had to stay, too,” said Peter Muller.

A modest expansion by Peter Stutchbury Architecture of the Newport home’s living room and terrace has been shortlisted in the alterations and additions category of this year’s NSW Chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects awards.

The home was named Trilogy House in recognition of the three architectural practices that built the house as it stands today: Muller; Pritzker Prize winner Glenn Murcutt and Wendy Lewin, who added a bedroom and entry space in 1995 taking the 119 sq m home to 140 sq m; and multiple award winner Peter Stutchbury Architecture that took the home’s interior to 151 sq m.

Architect Peter Muller designed his family home in Palm Beach to accommodate trees, including this one, which grew into the living room. Credit: Peter Muller

University of New South Wales architecture professor James Weirick said they represented different generations of modernist architects inspired by the Australian landscape, who put the site and a sense of place first.

New owners Gary and Ellen Smith bought the Muller-designed house for its rare view due north up Pittwater. It had been vacant, and was in a poor state with the garden so overgrown they couldn’t access the beach. “We didn’t really know what to do,” Gary Smith said.

Smith said the access holes had been filled in and the trees long dead by the time they moved in. “There had also been a cut-out in the ceiling where the tree went through. What they hadn’t done is fill in the holes where the tree projected upwards. When it rained, you got wet,” he said.

Smith looked up Muller online late one night to discover a video of him talking about modern architecture and his legacy. Smith emailed the architect who was then in his 80s. “In a nanosecond, he wrote back,” said Smith.

Muller recommended the Smiths contact Stutchbury and later visited the home.

Working with Stutchbury and Koopman, a principal with the practice, the Smiths ditched plans for a four-bedroom, three-bathroom, four-car home. They realised they needed better space rather than more, privacy from neighbouring homes that weren’t there when Muller designed the house 60 years ago, more light and a slightly larger living space.

They decided to spend a bit more on finishes, including a copper splashback, and 16 five-metre-high glass doors.

The panelled glass doors at the home provide privacy from neighbours.Credit: Wolter Peeters

Koopman sees the new double-height doors on both sides of the living room as walls that work like stage baffles, filtering the light and changing the scene. They screen the Smiths from neighbours and let in sun and air. “[The Smiths] couldn’t believe it when we said we could do a door like that,” she said.

Compared to the Australian average home of 235 sq m, the house is still small. And compared to nearby northern beaches mansions it is a minnow. But the Smiths say it is just right. “There’s not one part of the house we don’t use every day,” he said.

And compared to other new builds, Smith said: “The house has a story. It is not just another box.” Small brass markers show where the original structure end, and where changes made by Peter Stutchbury Architecture begin. A square pond under a frangipani is marked with an outline of the original Muller plan.

“It is really a celebration of what was here before,” said Koopman.

Koopman said the house was typical of Muller’s work, which interwove the landscape in the design. “By expanding the northern facing living room, we are seeing the sky, the ocean, the water. The outside of the home has been regenerated to bushland.”

She said if the home had been razed or even significantly altered it would have potentially impacted the gum trees on site. And it would have been a much bigger home, far greater than how the Smiths lived. “It is really something fantastic that Gary and Ellen recognised in themselves that they didn’t need a big house.”

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