Working round the limitations of a heritage building

PEOPLE love the look of the Queenslander, but let's face it, the layout does have its limitations.

House

PEOPLE love the look of the Queenslander - tin roof, verandas, wood panelling worked in tongue-and-groove - but, let's face it, the layout does have its limitations.

When architect Karen Ognibene first inspected her conversion project in Hawthorne, a fashionable corner of Brisbane's inner east, she had to take care not to scrape her head on the angled ceiling of the bathroom, a somewhat ungainly post-war add-on to the century-old worker's cottage.

There was a disconnect between the house and the garden, and the living areas had a cloistered feel. "Basically, it was your typical Queenslander," she says.

The conventional answer would have been to lift the existing house and build in underneath to add living space. Other extensions would be in character, replicating the period features. From the outside, the home would be a bigger, fresher version of its old self.

Ognibene, an associate with Brisbane-based architecture and interior design practice Arkhefield, had other ideas.

"In my opinion, the way to respect the integrity of a Queenslander is to not replicate the traditional details when you extend it, but rather gather inspiration from the traditional materials and forms and create an extension which is easily discernible as contemporary," she says.

"This approach allows the house to tell its story and ensures the house can grow and change with the times."

The outcome is an intriguing fusion of the old and the new, where no attempt is made to disguise where the original Queenslander ends and the sleek-lined extension begins.

From the street, the home glories in its stately heritage, down to the 1.8m veranda, which leads on to two front bedrooms and a living space off the existing central corridor.

The owners, from Tasmania, wanted to retain as much as possible of the original cottage.

The house was on short stumps, and their brief to Ognibene was to retain the look, settling any question about lifting it. Instead, space was excavated for a garage, storage, laundry and powder room.

The extension is where things got really interesting. Ognibene makes no bones that it is a modernist "white box", with contemporary clean lines. The two-storey extension connects to the original cottage at a split-level and allows for four bedrooms, two bathrooms and growing room for the owners. There's a 20m lap pool.

Ognibene says the trick to renovating a classic Queenslander is to be respectful of the heritage, but not of the constraints it can impose on modern living.

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