There’s a secret hiding behind this Brisbane, Australia, home’s sharp, brutalist façade: its original brick bungalow form is largely intact.

Carmen bought the three-bed house 16 years ago with her husband, Carl, to eventually retire there. At the time, they were living in a heritage home on a large block in the same leafy suburb of Brisbane. “We loved the area, and it was a small house on a small block of land. We thought, Retirement, downsizing—that would suit us in 10 or 15 years’ time,” recalls Carmen, who has since stopped working.

Before: Exterior

After: Exterior

Carl had envisioned knocking down the 1970s bungalow to build a sustainable, energy-efficient home in its place, while Carmen thought the original house was worthy of a renovation. When Carl died a few years ago, Carmen was left to move forward with their downsizing plan on her own, and eventually decided to renovate rather than rebuild.

“What was always in the back of my mind was a quote I’d heard by Carl Elefante, an architect, who said that the greenest building is the one that already exists,” Carmen says. “It cemented for me the idea that I could reuse and upgrade rather than demolish and replace.”

“There was a sentimental aspect to it as well,” she adds. “It continued my connection with Carl, because we bought the place together and had plans for it together.”

Carmen reached out to Johnny Hyde at OH Architecture after seeing another of the firm’s projects nearby. She says he was instantly on board with her vision for the house, which, while visually underwhelming, had far-reaching views to the coast and captured cool easterly breezes—a boon in semitropical Brisbane.

“I said to Johnny that I don’t need or want an extension. I want to be able to live at one level, and I want a house that is low maintenance and has an industrial aesthetic,” Carmen says. “I’ve always loved brutalist design and raw materials.”

Before: Living and Dining Room

After: Living and Dining Room

Hyde admits it was a unique brief in an area that’s better known for sprawling four and five-bedroom homes. “But that’s what made it a cool and interesting project to start design sketching,” he says. “Carmen only wanted two bedrooms, one bathroom, a little library space downstairs and a bit of storage. Usually everyone wants a walk-in robe, a couple of ensuites—you end up having a bathroom in every single bedroom. This house was about pulling it back—that’s the whole downsizing principle. She doesn’t want to spend her whole life cleaning the house.”

Before: Bathroom

After: Bathroom

Given that Carmen would be living alone, security was a priority in the redesign. To address it, Hyde placed a new garage in front of the house level with the main living area and created a concrete and metal “line of enclosure” around the home so Carmen had a barrier between the street and the front door. A gate leads inside the enclosure—in essence a new façade wrapping around the house—which leads to the original front door and a stairwell to the garden and Carmen’s library (located in the home’s old garage) on the lower level.

Before: Façade

After: Façade

Inside, not much changed with the layout—converting the third bedroom into a small walk-in wardrobe was as indulgent as it got. Rather, Hyde focused on maximizing the home’s assets by opening the interior to the northeast aspect and raising the ceiling.

“When we defined where Carmen was going to spend a lot of time it was like, okay, let’s take the existing 2.4 meter ceiling—which never feels awesome because it’s quite a low height—and see what we can do to pop it up and create a bit of volume, which will get more natural light in and pull breezes through,” Hyde explains.

Before: Rear Balcony

After: Rear Balcony

The result? “You come through that line of enclosure into the front door of the house, and it just completely opens up,” he says.

The front door opens into the now-spacious main living area, which comprises the kitchen, dining, and lounge, and flows out to the balcony. Down the hall, the two bedrooms and bathroom kept their lower ceiling height, in part due to budget, but also as a visual cue. “The idea was that the point that the ceiling drops delineates the private spaces from the social areas of the house,” Hyde explains.

Carmen loves to cook and bake, so the kitchen was built to her specifications with custom cabinetry to store her extensive collection of appliances and utensils and keep bench tops clear. The space is designed for entertaining, with large sliding glass doors to the balcony on the northeast side of the home overlooking the backyard, and simple timber slats separating the kitchen from the living area.

Before: Kitchen

After: Kitchen

Before: Hallway

After: Hallway

Outside, in keeping with the low-maintenance, minimal theme, Carmen engaged landscapers Green Care Project to create a lush garden of white-flowering Australian plants that’s high on visual impact but requires little upkeep, and definitely doesn’t involve any mowing. It’s punctuated with gabion seats that contain a tribute to Carl: his old tools are scattered among the recycled construction rubble filling the wire baskets.

After: Garden

Street-side, concrete blocks, compressed fibre cement sheets and metal mesh have transformed the exterior without erasing the home’s history: glimpses of the original orange-hued brickwork hint at its humble backstory.

“It’s a common brick that so many houses up here in Queensland used,” Hyde says. “We were happy to keep it, but we were also like, how do we pair that with the materials we want to use? We started to play around with that material color and saw that the concrete looked really nice with it.”

Here, the flourishing garden serves to soften the materials’ hard edges, with vines creeping up the steel mesh and shrubs spilling over the brickwork. "We had the view that the garden would take over and the façade would soften into the landscape," Hyde adds.

Carmen, who is adamant she didn’t want the house to look pretty or glamorous, is thrilled with it. “The structure at the front is wonderful in so many ways. Not only does it mitigate the issues of heat and sun from the western elevation, but it’s created a little bit of mystery. It’s like, what’s behind that?”

She’s sure that Carl would have approved, too. “He was a wise man, a visionary man,” she says. “He would have loved it.”

More Before & After:

To Revive Their Dated Bungalow, First They Chopped It in Half

In Australia, a Tumbledown Midcentury Is Leveled Up With a Sculptural Stair

Project Credits:

Architect of Record: Johnny Hyde, OH Architecture / @oh.architecture

Builder: Zone 1 Projects

Structural Engineer: SIA Engineers

Landscape Design: Green Care Project / @greencareproject