In 2019, a former student who had ascended to the position of Head of Innovation at a large-volume housing company approached our studio, Other Architects, with an irresistible offer: the opportunity to design a new variant on the standard Sydney suburban project home. If our design met the right criteria for cost, constructability and market appeal, it might one day go into production alongside established models such as the Balmoral Hamptons, the Leona Coastal and the Wilton Contemporary. To kick off this potential engagement, we drove out to Marsden Park, a rapidly developing suburb in Sydney’s north-west. There, within a vast housing estate, we toured a range of completed display homes and new houses under construction.
We were no strangers to suburbia. In the years leading up to our Marsden Park visit, Other Architects had embarked on a series of speculative projects that explored architecture’s potential agency within the standardized and bulk-built parameters of suburban housing. Specifically, our projects Offset House and House with a Missing Middle mined the excess gross floor area of Sydney’s so-called McMansions: large and cheaply built houses with numerous bedrooms, bathrooms and car spaces. In these projects we proposed to redistribute and remodel the redundant spaces typically allocated as media rooms, walk-in wardrobes, multi-car garages and convoluted
