The smallest bedroom in a West Footscray bungalow sits right beside the kitchen. Its position raises a question listings rarely ask: what might a house gain by trading some private space for communal space?
“Four bedrooms” looks good on a property listing. It promises room for children, for guests, for a study, for some future the buyer hasn't quite planned yet. The listing for 177 Essex Street, West Footscray, an original-condition Californian bungalow, leads with exactly that promise.
The floor plan is where things get interesting, and the potential I see isn't quite what the selling agent had in mind. The listing suggests three possibilities: extend the house, clear the site for a new build, or pursue a dual-occupancy development. These are all substantial interventions and, in my opinion, potentially unnecessary when there's another possibility worth exploring within the existing footprint.
It starts with the fourth bedroom. While the other bedrooms are grouped towards the front of the house, this one sits at the rear, immediately beside the kitchen and laundry. It could even have been a maid's room originally. A 1923 Californian bungalow in Brisbane, for example, included a maid's room separated from the kitchen by a walk-in pantry. Whatever its original purpose, at just 1.8 by 2.8 metres, it barely fits more than a bed. Reclaiming that space could give the kitchen and dining area more room for additional bench space, an island, a pantry, a larger dining table or simply a better arrangement for cooking and gathering.
Following that thought further, there's the covered patio and garden. Currently, reaching the patio means passing through the rear service area near the laundry. Rethinking these adjoining spaces could create a much stronger connection between the kitchen, dining area and outdoors. Imagine preparing food while friends and family gather on the patio, moving easily between the kitchen and garden, or opening the house up to a long summer lunch without everyone squeezing through the same narrow passage.
Sacred shared spaces
The bonding that happens in shared spaces is precious. A kitchen is where a grandparent can show a child how dough should actually feel, in a way a YouTube video can't quite convey. It's where a family dish is learned by standing beside your mother, who has made it a hundred times, or where you peel potatoes while listening to your partner talk about the ups and downs of their day.
The dining table is where vigorous debates, ideas, stories and ordinary updates are exchanged, whether over a weeknight dinner or a Sunday lunch deliberately set aside as the one occasion in a crowded week when everyone gathers for a meal. A living room is where people can enjoy something together, from playing Xbox or a board game to watching a film, which is a different experience from four people on four screens in four separate rooms. When the kitchen and dining area connect easily to a patio and garden, gatherings of relatives and friends can extend outdoors, with people moving naturally between the stove, the table and the yard.
It's remarkably easy to have a full house yet spend much of our time apart, each person retreating to a separate room. Bedrooms, privacy and individual space are important, but so are the places that bring us together. When considering a renovation, perhaps we should give more thought to whether our shared spaces genuinely encourage people to gather and spend time together. This isn't an argument for knocking down every wall in pursuit of open-plan living.
The question of how much space a home should devote to private rooms versus places for gathering has shaped Australian house design for decades. In an essay on AV Jennings for the Old Treasury Building, historian Don Garden describes how the company's project homes grew. Separate lounge and dining rooms gave way to a large family room or rumpus room beside the kitchen, often "open across a breakfast bar", while bedroom numbers climbed to four, five and occasionally six, one of them often better suited to a small office. The bigger suburban house could accommodate more bedrooms and larger shared spaces at once. A modest bungalow like 177 Essex Street presents a different challenge: deciding how best to use the floor space it already has.
More room for living, without losing privacy
Another interesting example is Bungalow, a renovation by Other Architects of a six-room timber house built in Bowral in the late 1800s, later cut in two and moved by trailer to a nearby Southern Highlands town. As described in Houses, architects Grace Mortlock and Lindsay Mulligan reorganised the existing rooms so that the combined kitchen, dining and living area almost doubled in size, taking up nearly half the original house.
The bedrooms were also rearranged, with the daughter moving into her parents' former room, while two new pavilions off the verandah provided a bedroom for the parents and a separate writing studio for one of the owners. Although the project involved additions, the dramatic improvement to the communal living areas came largely from reworking the existing layout. The family gained a much more generous space for cooking, dining and spending time together, while retaining bedrooms and private spaces for work and study.
Designing around family time
The brief for Mess Hall, the renovation of an 1870s terrace in Carlton, was not a standard brief at all. Rather than focusing on a particular room, it centred on a time of day: 3.30 pm to 6 pm, when the children return from school, dinner preparations begin and family life comes together, as reported in ArchitectureAU. Melbourne architecture practice Architecture Architecture, founded by Michael Roper and Nick James, also recognised that the household regularly welcomed drop-in visitors and dinner guests.
The ground floor was, in director Michael Roper's words, "uncommonly dark and pokey". Rather than adding a large extension, the architects reorganised the existing space. The Houses Awards jury highlighted how they incorporated a ground-floor room into the main living area, improved natural light by reclaiming a light well and reworked the staircase, almost eliminating the need for additional floor space. A clever furniture solution added further flexibility to the redesigned space: a kitchen island made from two benches on castors that can be rearranged, wheeled aside or packed down to accommodate different activities. The room has since hosted social gatherings, creative collaborations and even an impromptu play reading.
What five square metres could change
Both Bungalow and Mess Hall show what can happen when architects look beyond the existing arrangement of rooms and consider how the people living there actually want to use them. More communal space doesn't have to come at the expense of privacy. It's about deciding where each kind of space is most valuable.
That brings me back to the little bedroom beside the kitchen at 177 Essex Street. For some households, a fourth bedroom will be essential. For others, those five square metres might be far more valuable as part of a generous kitchen and dining area, with a better connection to the garden and more room for everyone to come together.
Personally, I think reworking the existing layout, as the architects did in both projects, would be the most rewarding approach to renovating 177 Essex Street. Rather than adding more space, I'd be looking at how to make the space work naturally for the people living in it.
