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An Outdoor Bath Room in the Australian Suburbs

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This delightfully bucolic bath room is part of a renovation by Andrew Maynard Architects in suburban Melbourne. It is completely open on one wall to the garden.

The wall can be closed off, by pulling down a compartmented overhead door, that borrows the construction technology of a traditional roll-up garage door, that spans the full width and height of the wall.

The bath room is at the far end of a three room addition to the house. Each of the rooms utilizes the same articulated roll-up garage door technique to open each of the walls to the garden in the front as well.

A refreshingly down-to-earth description from the architects makes the new construction clear. “The primary structure is a series of recycled grey iron bark portal frames with 12mm steel connectors at each junction. Within the portal structure is a simple stud frame. The glazed garage doors have a steel surround that fixes directly to the stud work. Western Red Cedar battens shade the structure”.

“Our practice is interested in the possibility of malleable and mobile space, especially in residential design. We want buildings to respond to the emerging social conditions created by mobile technology such as mobile phones, laptops, PDAs, cars, planes etc”.

The initial brief asked for an extension along the full width of the existing house, essentially filling the garden. But the architect proposed that the new addition should run along the edge of the garden to bring external space into the middle of the living areas.

The southern boundary was chosen to maximize solar access to the new spaces, (in the Southern hemisphere, the sun comes from the North, not the South) and to include them with the garden, by opening them up into outdoor rooms with the garage-door technology.