Our clients approached us to design a show house for an existing intermediate terrace house within an established housing development. Our aim was to explore how familiar, living spaces could be interpreted in a multitude of ways. To further align with our clients’ vision of creating an eco-friendly residential precinct with community at its heart, we broke down physical hierarchies in the house as a metaphor for engaging the end-user(s) in a plethora of ways – both horizontally and vertically. Taking advantage of the jacked roof and high ceilings, we maximised the abundance of natural light and cross ventilation throughout the house by introducing solutions that took away some of the permanence in the existing building structure – moving shelves could become wall partitions once rotated and permanent walls on the first floor were removed to reveal spaces where people could interact at different levels and heights. Plants were integral to the design of the house and we took advantage of the existing architectural elements to place planter boxes wherever we could near glass windows and doors.

At its core, Convertible House is not only a physical manifestation of building and design ideas with Tropical Living at its heart, it provides a glimpse of how a conventional house can be turned into a home with a myriad of possibilities using simple, age-old ideas and traditions.