The tea house is a gathering place, a place to share and come together in an spend quiet time with each other, away from the distractions of modern life.”
Project Name: Tea House
Studio Name: Jack Adcock Consulting
Project size: 100 m2
Site size: 1000 m2
Completion date: 2019
Building levels: 1
Location: Adelaide, Australia
Photography: Renae Schulz
In 2017 architect Paul Cooksey was chatting to his good friends about their plans to renovate their lean-to kitchen of their bungalow home in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs. The home had wonderful generous living spaces and bedrooms, but the kitchen was undersized for a family of 5 and didn’t make best use of the incredible garden and site footprint.
The house also had a studio space on the same site which was under used as a guest house/storage space.
“Would you let me try and help?” Paul asked. And off we went.
Architect’s Words:
The concept design was always linked around two central themes – Gathering and Gardens.
Gathering because the idea was to join the separate studio space as part of the existing house, providing more amenity and function to the existing structure. This mean the new extension was going to be a kitchen were different members of the family, living in different parts of the house could come together for generations to come.
And gardens because the house had previously been home to a well respected landscape architect and had been surrounded by native planting and earthy textures. The new extension wanted to celebrate this history with a new room that felt like it was part of the garden- a pavilion of sorts – that sat humbly in place.
The building form reflected this approach by breaking up the different parts of the home in a way that didn’t make the house seem massive from the street or from within. There was an urban rhythm to the suburban street and we didn’t want to create a massive box that destroyed this. We used materials and building forms that referenced the original villa.