Rightsize Renos

The rightside renovations studio is partnered with the development of a real-world alternative housing concept that is currently being developed by guide for the City of Sydney as to researchers at Monash and UniSA in collaboration with the City of Sydney.

Rightsize reovations incentivise homeowners to create new infill dwellings within existing houses supported by loan and property management approaches. Unlike downsizing, which often involves leaving the family home and suburb you love, a rightsized house is an appropriate scale and cost to suit the needs and circumstances of the household over time.

The studio will focus on the exploration of the rightsize renovation concept in a number of suburbs within the City of Sydney. It will study existing patterns of renovation and rightsizing already deployed by homeowners, contextually appropriate medium density typologies and the barriers to the uptake of DIY rightsize renovations to propose plot and precinct scale schemes and a guide for prospective owner-developers..

Thomas Jordan, Diagram

The agency of small-scale architectures within the urban environment is something that can frequently be overlooked or underestimated. The Rightsize Service seeks to inject both new ways of repurposing and renovating residential architecture and new ways of thinking about architecture, particularly in reference to dwellings. By the adaptive strategies developed, the Rightsize Service embraces the current conditions of our urban environment and generate urban influences through the incremental shift in residential typologies towards the more collaborative and flexible architectures it promotes. Corridor house embodies these ideals - through its provisional structures and expandability, the house welcomes a vast number and combination of occupants and simultaneously encourages the similar double-edged expansion onto the laneway across its neighbouring sites – providing opportunity for the street to become a secondary collective space. By following the renovation technique of extension, the house is able to both maintain the original heritage conditions originally identifies in the city view cottages, and extend our understanding of these idiosyncrasies – tapping into the collective nuances to provide a city-wide template for rightsizing projects.

Thomas Jordan, Model 1

The Corridor House is a multiple occupancy flexible dwelling embedded within the heritage fabric of Glebe. The original City View Cottage typology has been taken here and extended physically, organisationally and conceptually to generate an architecture of flexibility and porosity.

Thomas Jordan, Model 2

By using the cottage’s central corridor system, the plan has been prolonged from one end of the lot to the other, creating a visual transparency through the middle of the house which seeks to both create a spatial coherence and encourage a dual frontage. Similarly, the idiosyncratic moments of the traditional cottage have mutated to extend notions of what this heritage means.

Thomas Jordan, Plan 1

The dwelling utilises its orientation by extracting a portion of the stretched fabric to allow for a flexible outdoor/indoor courtyard in the middle of the house that lets light into the main living zones of the house, as well as providing access to the morning sunlight from the east. In shared mode the dwelling contains 3 bedrooms + 1 flexible bedroom and an abundance of provisional living/dining spaces.

Thomas Jordan, Plan 2

In its subdivided mode, the house can be split (by the closure of one of two doors) through the hinge of the central bedroom. This allows for the 4th bedroom to be located within the first or second dwelling, depending on occupants and living arrangement, providing further flexibility.

Thomas Jordan, Section

As a result, the rear of the site has the potential to become a secondary frontage for the building. Departing from the classic timber batten fence of Sydney’s laneways, by attaching it to its façade, the Corridor House alters the fence’s function in an effort to pre-empt the use of the laneway as a street with occupiable space for pedestrian movement.