Sitting upon a narrow hillside site, Nicholas Harvey Architect’s Gully House improves accessibility to a backyard gully to increase the occupants’ connection to nature.

The practice has extended the home, with the existing house accessed via the street. The yard was falling away around the time Harvey was called into action.

The 1960s bungalow has been retained, with the addition anchored deeply into the site’s terrain. The extension is conceived as a series of smaller pools eddying from the flow of family life, visualised here as a downhill stream following the contours of the site.

Every space within the house is part of the same volume, whether it be the existing dwelling through to the new extension. The seamless transitioning between old and new is a credit to the architect’s ability to unite two dwellings constructed decades apart. Each space has distinct character and a degree of physical separation from the other, with light-filled, elevated interior rooms making way to shaded and recessive external spaces.

Openings in the interior look to increase access and sightlines to the surrounding landscape. Mid-century elements within the new extension look to showcase the existing, with an antique fireplace refurbished and re-incorporated in the new work.