Renovated furniture warehouse turned housing community reflects a Melbourne suburb’s working-class history.

C.F. Row at 237 Napier Street sits within the rich urban fabric of Melbourne’s oldest inner-city suburb of Fitzroy, a collective body of dwellings marked by the patina of time. The site was the home of a premier furniture maker in the postwar years, which visitors and residents can see in the exterior, and now uses the original brick façade of the former building.

A new row of low-scale collaged brick and concrete townhouses form a rhythmic ensemble along the northern boundary along the Exhibition graffiti laneway, formulating a conversation between the existing low-scale Victorian rowhouses. The central east-west laneway running beside the townhouses allows the architecture to grow gradually towards the higher density dwellings to the south that extend upwards with a lightweight, aluminium piano nobile veiled by a filigree of metallic louvres. The multifamily complex is capped by series of an exclusive collection of metal cladding penthouses framed by a garden terrace. The neighbouring street fabric permeates through the site as a series of laneways and mediates between the site’s scale and its community.