The Bismarck House is the younger sibling of a pair of semi-detached dwellings in Bondi.
The design uses raw materials and sculpted spaces to integrate house and garden while orchestrating social interactions between the more public areas of the house and the laneway that runs along the semi’s northern boundary.
Our conceptual starting point for the project was to map the detailed context of the laneway: a long thin footprint immediately adjacent to the gritty rear-lane access for multiple commercial properties fronting onto Bondi Rd.
Into this context the ground floor of the house was conceived spatially and materially as a continuous garden between the boundary walls of the site. The brick common wall of the semi to the south was exposed and the new laneway edge to the north was rebuilt using bricks recycled from the site demolition.