Take Wing
Architect Sally Timmins of Timmins+Whyte Architecture and Design concedes she’d never designed a butterfly roof when she pitched it to her friends Nokky Sodsai and Ben Gayler as an elegant, playful solution to multiple challenges posed by their tight block in a pretty street in Abbotsford, in Melbourne’s inner-city.
The flexible form could compress and expand exactly where required to connect a voluminous new rear living space to the north-facing garden, minimise a discreetly setback upper storey from the street, and harmonise the entire home with the single-storey neighbour with which it shares an eastern boundary wall and a double-storey home to the west. Internally, its multiple, delightfully leaf-like folds would start low on the east and open up expansively to the west and rear, creating abundant light and generous volumes within a compact footprint.
