Room to Be Separate: A Staged Renovation in Brunswick West

A two-bedroom cottage bought deliberately small, and a master plan built around one sentence the clients said in the first hour.

Most people renovate because they've run out of room. This couple bought a house with fewer rooms than the one they were leaving.

They'd been in the neighbourhood three years and the new place is a five-minute walk from the old one. Their reasoning was disarming: "We've got too many rooms in our house, and we're just wasting them." No children, none planned. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a separate laundry, and a rear addition from a later era stuck onto an Edwardian front. What sold them was that it wasn't finished. As one of them put it, the house "spoke to the let's update it."

The sentence that set the brief

Early in the briefing workshop I asked them to finish a sentence. This will have been worth it if…

"We have our own space."

"And that doesn't have to be assigned to us."

"But I want us to be able to do different things at the same time."

That's the brief. Not floor area — simultaneity. Two people, one of whom works from home all day, wanting to be able to lift weights, take a video call, read a book and do the washing without any of it colliding.

It's a very different problem from "we need more room", and it has a very different answer. A bigger house solves it lazily and expensively. A small house solves it with zoning, thresholds and honest thinking about what happens at 7am on a Tuesday.

There was a quieter admission underneath it, too: "I require a lot of time to myself." In a two-bedroom cottage, that's the real constraint.

The laundry was never about the laundry

They named the laundry as the biggest pain in the house, and the complaint was specific:

"There's nowhere to fold it or anything. As soon as you wash a big blanket, there's no space to wash clothes."

"I think everything just starts falling apart when you're in the laundry because there's no space."

Then this, which is not a spatial complaint at all:

"I don't know how to make myself feel good doing this."

Here's what made it interesting. Elsewhere in the same conversation, entirely unconnected in their minds, they explained why the home gym had worked when a gym membership hadn't: "My problem isn't doing a workout, my problem is walking out of the front door." And why they'd started cooking at home more: "All it took was upgrading the size of the fridge."

They had already run two successful experiments in changing their own behaviour by changing their environment. Neither of them thought of it as architecture. It is exactly architecture.

So the laundry stopped being a fixtures list and became a habit to design for: pull-out sorting bins, and enough uninterrupted bench to fold a doona without staging it in three parts. As they said themselves, once they'd found the words — "you need to sort of earn enough space to do it with."

The way it earns that space is a piece of joinery I'm rather fond of. One wet zone does three jobs. A basin serves both the laundry and the toilet. A mirror on a hinged door swings out of the way for laundry use and back for the powder room. And the WC door slides across the basin opening, weighted so it closes itself, so the toilet is never on display when guests are there.

The real fear wasn't cost

"We just don't want to sink money into anything that's going to be wasted."

Not we can't afford it. We can't bear to undo it. That single distinction is why this project has no fixed budget and no single build.

Instead there's a master plan: the whole house resolved as one design, then built in stages, paid for over time. Stage one makes the house liveable and low-friction. Stage two adds the daily-life pieces — the studio, the workshop, the gym. Stage three refines and completes. The governing rule, written into the brief: never spend money on anything that will later be undone.

That principle shows up in the drawings, not just the payment schedule. When one pantry-and-laundry layout turned out to require the kitchen to be done at the same time, that counted against it. Staging became a design criterion.

What's proposed

The front room becomes a library. It's the room with the good ceilings and the original fireplace, and it was being used for storage. An L-shaped daybed with storage beneath, bookshelves above head height to use the height, and the fireplace brought back into working order. The door comes off — kept in the garage, in case winter changes their minds — so the room reads as part of the house rather than a closed box. It goes from a solitary space to a shared one.

The bathroom becomes two rooms, one of them special. The house sits in a heritage overlay, so nothing changes at the street. Inside, there's an option with an ensuite plus a whole room given over to bathing: a round freestanding bath, a pedestal basin, an expanded skylight overhead, and a tessellated tile pattern wrapping every surface, floor to ceiling, with aged brass tapware. It's the most indulgent square metres in the project and the easiest to justify.

Light gets borrowed rather than added. The good northern light on this block is locked behind the facade that has to stay, and the living end faces the wrong way. So: expand the existing skylights rather than cut new ones, use obscure glazing to borrow light from the bedroom into the ensuite, and a translucent panel to pull kitchen light into the pantry and laundry.

A building in the backyard. Off the rear laneway, holding the workshop, the gym, and an office above, with the on-site car space designed into it rather than around it. Council will expect that space to remain, so it drives the plan — three parking layouts were tested before the building took shape.

The bit I didn't expect to enjoy

Somewhere in the middle of the second session, mid-way through packing up their old house, one of them said this:

"I really love it. But my only hesitation is that area outside the bath, the toilet, and the sink feels like wasted space to me, where what I'd really love to see is a bit more storage. And I know that sounds so boring. It is so boring."

It isn't boring. It's the most useful thing a client can say, and it only ever gets said by someone who is currently holding a box. The storage problem in this house isn't food — it's ski gear, sports equipment, and the things two active people accumulate. That's a different design problem from a pantry, and it only surfaced because we were still talking at the right moment.

Where it's up to

The house settled in August 2026 and the first concept set — fourteen sheets covering the house and the backyard building — has been presented. Costing follows client feedback, then a planning application, since anything here triggers one.

They're a good example of something I say often: it's more important to design a small house well than a large one. A big house forgives a bad plan. A two-bedroom cottage where two people work, train and live all day forgives nothing at all.