Located in Perth, Australia, Veiled House features a striking blend of old and new, designed by JUO in 2019. Originally a 1908 worker?s cottage, the designers aimed to celebrate its historic character while creating a modern family home.

With sweeping views of the Perth skyline, the existing rundown and uninhabitable 1908 worker?s cottage had been poorly maintained over the years, with many haphazard and structurally unsound additions. The brief was to strip back the property to reveal the original cottage and celebrate its character and proportions whilst creating an inner city family home.

The aesthetic strategy was for the additions to be in contrast to the existing cottage with clear separation between the new and old. A glass link flanked by landscaping separates the structures, with the old red face brickwork set off by the charcoal face brickwork of the new.
With the long axis of this site facing west, and the short axis facing north, the spaces were stacked behind the existing cottage across the short width of the site in order to face north exclusively. This led to a courtyard arrangement, with a single storey garage structure on the rear boundary so as not to obscure too much winter sunlight entering the interior spaces of the main house. The proportions of building mass not only supported a passive solar design response, but also complemented the scale of the existing cottage.

In restoring the cottage and reinstating its original features such as the bullnos...