A Home Designed to Make Work a Pleasure

A house built for working, cooking, gardening and entertaining opens to the landscape while offering shelter from the summer sun

If you’re going to work from home, you want it to be a home in which you like working, and that’s exactly what these homeowners set out to create when they embarked on building their house in far northeastern New South Wales, Australia. With help from architects Sarah Aldridge and Jason Trisley of Space Studio, the couple created a home that would meet their needs for work, rest and play.

“Both clients carry out consultancy work from home, so a good home office space was an essential part of the brief,” Aldridge says. Their children live a distance away, and tend to visit infrequently but for longer periods, so it was important to the clients that they had a separate space for them. The guest bedroom has plenty of storage and its own en suite bathroom, and a refurbished onsite guest cottage is well used. The home office doubles as an additional guest space.

The owners are excellent cooks and gardeners and enjoy entertaining, so in addition to a kitchen and a butler’s kitchen, the architects designed a generous covered area next to the back door with gardening tool storage and a sink for washing vegetables picked from the garden.