House Leichhardt is located in Leichhardt, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, and was designed by Rolf Ockert Design. It was completed in 2012, and features a mixture of styles that make it a very unique home. After long negotiations with the planning department who pretty much told us that the scheme was not approvable, the project was called to a full council meeting. It was due to the direct influence of the mayor that the design was approved as submitted in the end. The mayor acknowledged that old houses like ours were too small to be sufficient as family homes these days. Rather than extending the ground floor to the extent that any outdoor area becomes too small to be of use, the mayor promoted our approach to add a second storey instead. Being only about 100 m2 in size, the existing free-standing house was far too small for its intended use as a home for a young family with children. The only way to accommodate the intended brief was to build a two storey addition, something that did not exist in the area.
