Powell Street House

Robert Simeoni Architects


The existing house had a quiet interior and muted light, and the design was developed in response to this, with a deliberate quietness, and the creation of long diagonal views through the existing shallow floor plan which delivers an intriguing quality of light to the newly created space. Views were limited and curated through the new steel windows utilising a combination of clear and opaque glazing, using narrow reeded patterned glass, sympathetic to the original era of the house. Where openings have been formed or modified, such alterations have been executed in a way which leave clear traces of the original yet introducing new values of light and shade through glass. The conception of a quiet space, with ambiguous connections between the existing and the new, the outside and the inside. The addition forms a double height volume and deliberately incorporates a carefully located hidden high-level window, there to capture the late afternoon wash of sunlight. Nothing is without influence. Everything goes through a process of witnessing/entering the mind, then storage, unconscious and conscious becoming a process of repeating constantly in the background going over and over, then remembering, always remembering, to quote a scene, describing the way light filtered into a space, casting a shadow upon a wall, the ground. I remember these shadows. I try to repeat these shadows. The memories become truly my turn, romanticised, maybe, but true, nonetheless.

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