Metropolis, April 2008

Fitzroy North just got its first tattoo. The town, outside of Melbourne, has long been known for Victorian houses on tree-lined streets, but things are changing. A younger crowd is moving in and the sleepy suburb is looking edgier, thanks in part to a new project by Andrew Maynard Architects.

Charged with livening up a house that, as Maynard says, "was stuck in the '50s," AMA offered a simple, provocative solution. The house expands into a big, white box with a glass wall, over which climbs a stylized pattern of leaves and branches. That’s the tattoo. But it’s not just for show—the design is a brilliant answer to a very sticky problem. Rescode.

Rescode is Australia's set of strict building laws that require, among other things, 75 percent opacity on second-story windows. "Rescode assumes all Australians are perverts," Maynard says of its over-the-top demands. "We're not allowed to look into our neighbors' windows." But AMA's clients wanted the extension to connect to its surroundings. So how do you shield a house from its neighbors and reach out to them at the same time? Easy: give it a tattoo.

Maynard and his crew covered the glass (75 percent of it, to be exact) with a lacy, white vinyl sticker, abstracted from a photo they took of trees in a local park. In addition to shading the interior and appeasing Rescode, the sticker blends the bare-bones box into its leafy, suburban home.

So far, so good. Rescode and the clients were happy, but for the architect, something was missing. "I had a problem with the house about halfway through construction: that big, blank, white wall," Maynard says. The bare facade looked too stark so, using the window design as a guide, they cut out a stencil. "It's like a part of a tattoo poking out the sleeve of your t-shirt," explains Maynard—it hints at the bigger design hidden around the corner. And, like the vinyl sticker, it serves multiple roles, softening the façade while nodding to the real trees out back.

You don't see a lot of architects picking up spray cans and tagging their projects, but for AMA it was an obvious move. "To a certain extent," Maynard says, "all architects want to get their hands dirty." But what would the neighbors think?