Corner block house designs: what the second street gives you

Corner blocks come up in our first meetings more often than their share of Brisbane would suggest. People buy them for the light and the sense of space, then find that the house on them was designed for a block with one front. The kitchen faces a side street. The verandah faces a fence. The best corner of the site holds a clothesline.

The design problem is simple to state and hard to solve. A corner block has two street frontages, which means two front setbacks, two lots of passing traffic and two directions the house has to look good from. It also usually means more garden than a standard lot, spread around the house rather than behind it. Below is how we work through it.

Two fronts, one entrance

The first decision is which street the house addresses. Council treats the shorter frontage as the front for setback purposes on most Brisbane lots, but people arrive at the door they can see, so the entry should sit on the street with the footpath traffic, and the driveway should come off the quieter one where it can. Getting the car off the busier street also frees that frontage for the room you want to show.

The second frontage is not a side. It is seen by everyone who turns the corner, so blank walls, service yards and the back of the garage do not belong on it. We treat it with the same materials and window rhythm as the front, and we put a real room behind it.

Which way the living faces

On a standard block the living room goes at the back, facing the yard. On a corner there is no back. The living area wants to face the garden and the good sun, which in Brisbane means north or north-east, and to turn away from the street with the most traffic. Sometimes those two wishes agree. When they do not, we give the living room the sun and screen the street with a deep verandah, battens or planting, rather than giving up the light.

Bedrooms go to the quieter frontage or the internal boundary. On a sloping corner, which is most of them in the inner suburbs, a split level lets the living sit up at street height with the bedrooms half a level down and further from the footpath.

The L-shaped plan

The plan that suits a corner best is an L. Two wings along the two street boundaries, with the living areas at the join and a private courtyard held in the angle. Every room faces either the street or the courtyard, so nothing looks at a fence. The courtyard is sheltered on two sides by the house itself, which matters in a Brisbane summer storm, and the open side can be closed with a wall or a garden bed and still feel generous.

The L also solves cross ventilation. Rooms one room deep with openings on two sides catch the north-easterly in the afternoon and let it out the other side. It is the oldest trick in Queenslander design and a corner block is the easiest place to use it.

Two houses on one block

Corner blocks are the ones people ask us about dual occupancy on, because two frontages can mean two addresses. Whether the block can be split depends on its size, its zoning and the neighbourhood plan it sits in, and the answer changes from street to street. The honest sequence is to check before you design. If a subdivision is possible, each house gets its own frontage and its own driveway and neither looks like the back of the other. If it is not, a secondary dwelling with a separate entry off the second street is often the next best thing.

Character houses on corners

A good number of the corner houses we see are pre-1947 and sit under the traditional building character overlay. Old Queenslanders on corners usually have a verandah that turns the corner with the house, and the overlay wants to keep it that way. That is rarely a loss. The wrapped verandah is the best thing about the house. The new work goes behind it or under it, and the two street elevations keep their timber, their roof form and their windows. We cover how the overlay actually works on the heritage renovations page.

Renovate or start again

Because the existing house was almost always planned for one front, corner blocks are where we most often have the knockdown conversation. If the house is post-war, low, badly oriented and not protected, a knockdown and rebuild lets the new house use both frontages properly from the first line of the drawings. If it is a Queenslander, raising it and building under keeps the street elevations and adds the level that faces the garden. We price both paths from the same brief so you can see the difference in real numbers rather than opinions.

If you have a corner block and a house that ignores half of it, bring the site plan to a free meeting at the studio. We will tell you what the block can carry before anyone draws a thing.