Avoid the All-Gone-Wrong Renovation

By Alex May

There is a dark side to Sydney's charming Victorian terraces and grand Federation homes: the all-gone-wrong renovation.

Paddington and Glebe still contain Victorian terraces that once had cast iron lace but now have timber balustrades, or exposed brick where there was once solid plaster. The National Estate-listed suburb of Haberfield has its share of Federation houses with aluminium sliding windows instead of original timber and coloured glass windows.

Raine & Horne Haberfield principal Michael Tringali says Federation houses in the inner west suburb that have been renovated unsympathetically tend to fetch up to $300,000 less than houses that have original features in tact.

"If I have two houses in the same street on the same size block of land and one has been unsympathetically renovated then it will be 25 to 30 per cent less than the one with original features," he says.

Ironically, it is people who spent money "improving" their house with poorly chosen materials like aluminium windows that end up with a lower value property than the neighbour who did not spend a cent.

National Trust Conservation Director Jacqui Goddard says most renovators "stuff up" their houses with the best of intentions."Really, the best way to ruin a house is to try to make it fit the fashion," she says. "People can't resist tinkering with their houses, and more often than not they don't get it quite right."

TO RESTORE OR NOT TO RESTORE?

So how do you make sure that those feature walls or bi-fold doors you install today don't become the aluminium windows, pebblecrete or concrete balustrades of the future?

With Sydney in a grip of renovation frenzy, mortgage-laden home owners should think twice about how they improve an older-style property so they don't degrade its value in the long term. Clive Lucas, Stapleton & Partners director Ian Stapleton, one of Sydney's most experienced heritage architects and authors, says the safest way to maintain the value of a property is to restore it.

"These days restoration is not mandatory or needed - it's just one option that can produce an attractive result and I would say it's the conservative option when it comes to value," he says.

Many council areas in Sydney now have heritage controls to ensure ostentatious and overly large renovations are not allowed in conservation areas, but that doesn't always prevent unsympathetic renovation. People can still choose materials that ruin the look of a house or mar the original design by knocking out walls or adding a storey.

"These days, the done thing is to restore the faade and do something quite modern out the back," Stapleton says.
"You don't need to keep the original kitchens or bathrooms, it's quite appropriate to treat those rooms as areas that are constantly renewed."

Tringali says the most sought after older-style properties are those that marry the beauty and rarity of period decorative details with modern open plan living areas, a kitchen with stainless steel appliances and two modern bathrooms.

HUNTERS HILL: A CASE STUDY

This Edwardian freestanding house in Ellesmere Ave has only two bedrooms. Goddard, an experienced heritage architect, says this "splendid" house does not need any restoration but may require renovation to add more space.
"You don't want to render the brickwork of an Edwardian place and put in big sliding doors to the front yard - it wouldn't be right," she says.
"But you probably want to get into those back rooms which were often small and less useable and just rip them open."
Stapleton says the house has lovely street appeal and the obvious way to improve it is to open up the back rooms to the garden and possibly create a one or two storey extension at the rear.
"You could play up the heritage qualities by putting cane furniture on to the front verandah and maybe installing some blinds," he says.
Stapleton says front verandahs were often used as a retreat on hot summer evenings, and sometimes the boys of the house were made to sleep on them.
"That verandah is quite lovely and it offers the opportunity to put in an ensuite bathroom or extra clothes storage around the side off the main bedroom," he says.
Goddard and Stapleton agree that the decorative high ceilings, fireplaces and timber joinery are an integral part of the value of the house and should not be removed.
"Originally, that ceiling would have been picked out in five colours and just above the picture rail you could scrape back the paint and you might find a frieze of Eucalyptus leaves or something else highly decorative," Stapleton says.
"You could go the whole hog and attempt to restore that, but these days it is fine to simply paint it white."
Goddard says it would not be right to attempt to reproduce the highly decorative ceilings and timber fretwork in a new rear extension.
"There was a hierarchy of spaces and only the front rooms had those types of things - the back rooms were for function only and often were more austere," she says.

MANLY TERRACES: ANOTHER CASE IN POINT

These two three-bedroom, three-bathroom Gothic terraces in Manly were built in 1879 and have been renovated for sale.
Stapleton, whose company actually did the heritage research on the Manly properties, says the exteriors have been nicely restored and the interiors seem "quite modern, but maybe a bit too perfect".
"One of the things that adds value to an old house is what I call the honourable scars of age - the worn steps, that kind of thing," he says.
"The whole idea of a heritage restoration is to maintain the honourable scars and remove what we call the accretions, or the things that don't add to the architectural style."
Goddard says the modern and sleek interiors are fashionable now but don't give the building a sense that many families once lived in the house.
"It is perfectly fine to do the modern thing inside a house like this, but you just don't get that whole patina of age that makes the place really valuable," she says.

DECIDING WHAT TO DO

Both Goddard and Stapleton suggest that home owners who are keen to renovate spend time researching and understanding their house before doing any renovations.

"The primary thing is for owners to appreciate and understand what they are doing to their house and not trust a builder or even an architect to get it right," he says.

Stapleton says home owners can engage a heritage specialist for between $150 and $250 an hour to come to their house to explain the significance of a property and the potential for additions and improvements.
"It should only take a couple of hours and while that might seem like a lot of money to spend, when you think of what you can sell your house for, it is not much," he says.

Goddard says the skill is to learn to "read" a house and see where it has been changed over time. "You can often tell from doorways or marks on the plaster how a house has changed and what needs to be done to either restore it or improve it," she says.
"It's just about looking and understanding before you go and rip something out."

CASE STUDY

The transformation of Markus Lambert and Dai Le's single storey early Federation house in Dulwich Hill into a two storey Victorian house is a tale of research, persistence and passion.
Markus had helped his father restore a 1600s house in Germany, which involved creating rubber moulds to make new terracotta tiles and researching how ceilings were made in the 1700s.
"This was easy, in comparison," he says. "It was just a matter of reading a lot of books and taking pictures of lots of houses that I liked. I didn't have to go as far as my father had gone."
Markus spent four months researching the house and architecture styles before engaging an architect to design the house and then doing the work himself as an owner-builder.
He sourced recycled materials from three places: "the side of the road, the Trading Post and as a last resort the second-hand building places".
"I just had an old station wagon and would spend weekends picking up materials - I got the cast iron on my verandah from the Blue Mountains for $250," he says.
Markus says he managed to turn his three-bedroom house into a six-bedroom house with a new open plan living area for around $1000 a square metre.
"That is very cheap and you do it by finding the right materials and looking around," he says.

GETTING IT WRONG:

• Large driveways or garages in the front yards of houses built before the 1940s.
• Aluminium windows as a replacement for timber windows - ask a timber joiner to recreate what was originally there.
• Aluminium siding or cladding which was often placed over timber weatherboard
• Too-large second storey additions.
• Removing the signs of age - worn steps, old floorboards - the very stuff that adds to the patina of age.

GETTING IT RIGHT

• Find out whether your local council offers any heritage guidelines or advice - in some council areas it is free.
• Visit the National Trust website and bookstores to scour for information about house styles and restoration - they are also the best source of finding suppliers that sell heritage materials.
• See if you can find an original photo of the house - track down previous owners and ask if they have any family snapshots that show the way the house looked.
• Learn all you can about the house, the architectural style it follows and don't let any builder or even architect do anything to the house without understanding the reasons.