For the owner of a 100-year-old weatherboard cottage in Abbotsford, the priorities of the two-level back renovation commissioned from Julie Firkin Architects were a convivial kitchen — “she’s a keen cook who likes to cook in front of people” — and the need to keep a decent garden.

For Firkin, the priorities were a central 4.5 x 4 metre usable courtyard that also delivered a core feed of natural lighting, and carefully angling the dual-tone Colorbond-clad addition so that views along a narrow, glazed connecting corridor from the old to the new weren’t just straight-up reveals but had a sense of discovery; “a sense of possibility”.

Skewing the addition was also about ensuring the back windows weren’t directly facing the harsh western sun. “If we’d kept everything straight”, Firkin says, “the building would also have been right in the middle of the garden.” Unusually, the new living area for the now four-bedroom home is on the upper level; “25 square metres of nice, large airy space with big windows and beautiful sky views”. The staircase access to this room is a gorgeous piece of design work, replete with even more angular interest in plaster form and glazed elements.

“I was playing with the simple and the complex and it was all very carefully thought through,” Firkin says. “We manoeuvred it to fit in with the angles”. Thoughtful too is the way the long concrete kitchen bench continues for almost two metres into the sun court to become “another meal spot,” that is slightly over-mantled by the projection of the upper floor.

The courtyard is the place where you really get to appreciate the origami-like ingenuity of a design where planes, angled intersections and different materials are continually creating moments of visual fascination, albeit – as the architect points out – “in a quiet way”.