site visit at E Bay house

Design started today, and first things first, we went to our site for this project "changing spaces". The Elizabeth Bay House is a heritage building in the close suburbs of Sydney. It overlooks a "picturesque marine landscape" and is, apparently, a manifestation of the neo-classical/greek revival era.... or so they say.
It used to be a house, then it was divided into small independant apartments, and is now a sort of museum. From what I understand, the project will be to change it into a house again, or appartments, not sure...
I guess it was interesting enough, and certainly unusual on this side of the world, but really, the space I found most interesting was the central area and the staircase. It has an eliptic shape which, after enquiry, is because in that time, they were obsessed with natural studies and notably that the earth travels around the sun on an eliptic orbit, rather than the sun traveling around us on a circular orbit.......... Who knows......... the staircase is "geometrical" but I didn't exactly follow the explanation for that, but what I did get is that if you took out even only the first step, the whole thing would come crashing down, so basically, you don't want to do that. That space was interesting because it resembled an outdoor space but inside, with a sort of arcade creating an internal corridor distributing the upstairs rooms. Also the quality and amount of light coming from the windows around the ceiling, gave a completely different feel to the space, with the other rooms being generally quite dark. Of course, the double height and all the other spaces coming off this central space also gave it a quality of breathing space, at the center of a clustered and divided periphery........ Hum, ok this is all pretty jargonish bs right there and i'm sorry about that, i'm just trying to put into words how I felt before i forget... which should happen anytime soon.
We'll have to go back because we have to do some sketching there but the guided tour we had was an interesting starting point.......................................................................................................
That's all folks