Some homes are built. Others are carefully unpicked and put back together with more intention than before. Aldgate House, a 1915 sandstone villa in the Adelaide Hills, is the second kind. At its heart sat a structural puzzle, a conservatory that had never been built to hold a functioning kitchen. What followed was an architectural odyssey, equal parts engineering and artistry.

The brief from Fabrikate was deliberate and restrained, to sharpen what was already there rather than start again. No extension. No excess. Almost nothing was demolished. Instead, the owners' own furniture, art and objects, collected over years of travel, were kept and woven back through the home, becoming the starting point for every decision that followed.

The kitchen was always meant to be the social heart of the home, a place to cook, talk and gather all at once, anchored by a two-way fireplace that links the dining and living areas. To do that, it had to curve. Countless hours went into drafting and mapping the work for the CNC machine, and over two hundred more on the workshop floor, refining function until every door and drawer moved exactly as it should.