Occasionally, buildings have punctuation marks. At the House in Northcote, it is an exclamation point: a tree, growing through a hole in the middle of the living room floor. It emphatically makes a statement that is spoken more quietly throughout other parts of the house: the sense of ‘insideness’ is a rather contingent, tenuous thing. Such a quality - though it might seem like a given for any space within a building - is always an achievement of architectural features that construct distinctions between the domains of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. To unsettle this category of space is to draw out the fundamentals of architecture and building; this is a recurring theme of the House in Northcote.

The internal and external wall surfaces of the lower storey are identical: a dark, earthy-brown brick. Its surface is rough and organic. In the right light, especially when it falls from the skylight above, the larger living room feels more like an enclosed courtyard than an internal space. These brick walls sit
on short concrete plinths that rise to skirting height. In the disconnect that this creates between the walls and the floor, it appears as if the floor surface has dropped slightly or perhaps that the floor structure is absent altogether and the tiles are laid directly on the earth. The latter sense is reinforced by the dusty brown, rough-cut paving-like character of the tiles. At two moments in the hallway, where the external courtyards cut the deepest into the volume of the house, these tiles become larger, irregular slabs of stone and are bordered by planters at floor level on one side and a large window to the garden on the other. Here, the informality and vegetation of the garden have breached the walls of the house and spilled into the hallway. These evocations of earthen floors and divergences from the expected qualities of interiority give the house its slightly archaic quality. Its simple, low, gabled roof form suggests something archetypal. Together, they hint at a timeless primitivism - a lingering architectural remnant in the backstreets of Northcote.