“What once was, now is.”

Our houses speak to tell our stories, they grow and change as we do, banks of our accumulative memory.

Heritage houses fall short of this, preserving a story only of its first inhabitants. They stand safeguarded by protocols that punish alterations from land subdivision to paint finish.

Embedded within these homes are outdated ideologies that psychologically dismantle our culture as individuals, and as architects. This fervent preservation is stunting our growth, creating an unattainable market as housing provisions stagnate.

An interrogation of protocol is long overdue –

In this new vision, a condition of four adjacent early, mid, and late Victorian homes are merged for a new intimacy. It introduces an operation that both activates densification across heritage suburbs and fluidly adapts the home to embody the highest ambitions of its past, and present.

Collectively, these homes form a cabinet of curiosities, containing ornament to be rediscovered and rearranged. By designing at the 1:1, a direct preservation is enacted through a tactile personal connection. It questions how each could fit into the resident’s routine as opposed to remaining at eye’s reach. Within, each ornament is treated as a generative tool to produce a kit of parts, able to liberate any heritage type.

Without patronising the history, these altered homes teach us to profess to love, they show us how we too might carry valuable parts of the past into the restless future.