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Marianne House by Victoria Merrett Architects is a quiet expansion of the familiar, where the intimacy of a cabin gives shape to a more generous home. The original house held a closeness the owners wanted to preserve: rooms gathered beneath warm ceilings, with the landscape always near. Keeping its footprint established the terms of the extension, allowing the home to grow around the qualities already valued. The smaller rooms remain part of its daily rhythm, their enclosure giving the openness beyond something to unfold from. Familiarity carries through the house, even as its proportions shift and its possibilities broaden.

The plan opens towards the north west garden, bringing cooking, dining and living beneath a pitched roof. Brick, timber and tile establish a shared language between the cabin and extension, their repetition allowing the spaces to change without losing their connection. Dark ceiling boards hold shadow overhead; pale walls receive the afternoon light. Joinery gathers the practical demands of the room into broad planes, leaving shelves and openings to punctuate its surface. With fewer materials, their individual qualities become more apparent. Grain, joints and reflection give the interior its detail, while the trees beyond the windows bring movement to the composition.

Continuity required close attention where the existing building meets the extension. Different ceiling heights, structural conditions and floor levels had to be reconciled, with each junction considered against the scale of the original cabin. The challenge lay in giving the new spaces their generosity while protecting the intimacy beside them. Much of this work becomes almost imperceptible in the finished house. Steps absorb changes in level, openings draw the gaze ahead, and familiar surfaces give the passage a continuous thread. The ease of moving through these spaces carries the precision of their making, allowing distinct parts to feel comfortable in one another’s company.

In the living area, that care becomes tangible. A deep window seat gives the garden view a place to be occupied. The hearth anchors the open perimeter, providing a point of stillness within the room. Above, exposed beams establish a measured rhythm, softened by the pendant suspended over the dining table. Sliding doors extend the space onto the terrace, bringing the landscape into the ordinary rituals of the home. Each gesture offers a way to settle: beside the fire, along the window, around a meal. The room’s generosity is felt through these places and the life they accommodate.

Once complete, the retained rooms revealed the emotional depth of that first decision to keep them. Their smaller scale became the heart of the home, giving the extension a history it could draw upon. Marianne House finds its character in this exchange. The new living spaces make the cabin’s intimacy more palpable, while the cabin gives their openness a sense of belonging. What remains is active in shaping what follows. The house grows through a careful understanding of that relationship, gaining space while deepening its connection to the rooms, textures and landscape that first made it a place to call home.

Victoria Merrett Architects 

Tasha Tylee

Photography

Tatjana Melchiorre

Stylist

Marianne House by Victoria Merrett Architects is a study in quiet continuity, where timber, brick and shifting light carry the warmth of an old cabin forward.

Marianne House

Residential

Brush Stool by Sestra begins with a familiar gesture: having your hair brushed by someone you trust. A moment of care, often passing without notice, becomes the starting point for an aluminium object, its comb silhouette carrying an association that feels both intimate and open. The people, room and particular occasion fall away, leaving space for another memory to enter. There is enough familiarity to recognise the feeling, while the story remains your own. Beneath its curved seat, a sequence of vertical planes gives this small domestic ritual an architectural presence, held between the softness of recollection and a precise outline.

Across the brushed aluminium with its wax finish, light settles unevenly. Marks travel in different directions, catching fragments of the room and allowing them to dissolve into one another. As you move, the faces shift between reflection and shadow, while the edges remain clear, sometimes appearing almost illuminated. This changing surface follows something of memory itself, where an atmosphere can remain more vivid than the event that made it. The darkness between the seat's two layers gives the curve emphasis. From one angle the stool feels solid; from another, its thin planes begin to separate into lines, intervals and reflected light.

The material brings its own conditions. Aluminium offers the lightness needed for a stool to move easily, alongside the durability to remain in use. Its coolness also opens a question about how tenderness is felt through an object. For Sestra, sensation extends beyond warmth: a cold floor on an early winter morning carries an emotional register of its own. Construction required a similar sensitivity. At the seat's angle, even a slight variation in curvature could demand visible bolts. Large industrial fixings on the first prototype changed its character, prompting quieter hardware and attention to how each connection meets the whole.

Time enters through the surface. Aluminium receives marks, yet polishing can bring it back, allowing traces of use to recede. Some smaller components are reclaimed, their previous lives becoming indistinguishable from new material once finished. Within an object concerned with remembering, this capacity for renewal leaves an unexpected resonance. The form developed through a related process of adjustment, moving between recognition and abstraction until the silhouette held. Too literal, and the association would be exhausted at first glance; reduced too far, it would disappear. Each decision asks how much can be taken away while keeping the original feeling within reach.

Here, the art of reduction becomes a way of leaving something available. Sestra approaches it through precision, removing what no longer serves the question and allowing the person encountering the object to complete its meaning. Like a film that leaves parts of its story untold, the stool invites participation. Its purpose remains simple: a place to sit, at a height where another person's hands can reach your hair, with nothing interrupting the gesture. Empty, it waits as furniture. Through use, the distance between material and memory narrows, and an ordinary act of care finds room to happen once again.

SESTRÁ

Riccardo Biagioni Angeli

Photography 

Ruben Iskander Hilkens

Bogdan Shirokov

Brush Stool by Sestra explores the memory of care through aluminium with a wax finish. Its comb silhouette recalls the intimacy of having your hair brushed, leaving space for personal memory to complete the object.

Brush Stool

Stool

Cvetan Koceski  


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