An enchanting garden refuge: Commercial Road

The blousing proportions of the traditional Australian suburban subdivision now seem impossibly, and perhaps a little irresponsibly, generous. The question of what to do with this surplus space has often been answered in an unsatisfying way.

Vittino Ashe has created something remarkably enchanting with very little in this addition to a home in Perth. The overall project comprises a reorganized interface with the street at the “face” of the house, as well as a new pavilion and enclosed basketball court at the rear.

The works at the front of the house created a new car park and boosted security and privacy in a quiet way through the use of a timber slat fence.

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At the front of the house, Vittino Ashe created a new car port and boosted security.

Image: Mathieu Cocho

But it is the pavilion which is really worth chewing on. The dimensions of the room are too long and narrow to be immediately recognizable as being dedicated to any particular use, and rather than being a failure of design this is instead what makes the little alcove liberating. It is, rather, an “escape from the confines of the cottage,” in the words of the architects. A surplus scrap of space that can be used for entertaining, relaxing, reading or working. Whatever you like, it’s yours, the pavilion doesn’t care.

Next door is an enclosed toilet and an open-air shower. A cyclone mesh structure, also present in the walls of the basketball court, means that the entire pavilion is wreathed in a juicy corona of vines. A barbecue and seating are set into the structure in a way that is both elegant and practical.

The basketball court is itself more charming than a basketball court really has any right to be. Enclosed on three sides by a thick passionfruit vine tumbling down the cyclone mesh fence, the space is a monastic cloister, with the sounds of the ball slapping onto the concrete muffled and contained by the plants. A jacaranda in the neighbour’s garden bends over the fence and spills its petals across the slate-coloured concrete.

While the project has not necessarily dictated marvellous new activities and patterns of domesticity, it has developed the flavour of what existed in a kind of architec-tural Maillard reaction. A compliance-required setback, for instance, means that the entire structure is set back from the boundary, leaving a narrow strip of space for the dog to race around before it exhausts itself and flops down on the lawn.