Year
2022

State
Victoria

Photographer
Timothy Kaye

Builder
Dimpat

A walking distance to the Shrine of Remembrance and overlooking Fawkner Park, this project brief was to design a significant alteration to an existing three-bedroom apartment.

The original multi-storey concrete and glass apartment building was designed in the early 1980s by the lead architect of the Melbourne Myer Music Bowl, Barry Patten – during his tenure at renowned architecture office Yuncken Freeman Architects. Our intervention centred around opening up main living areas towards Port Phillip Bay views as well as improving liveability and comfort.

The approach was to remove unnecessary access paths, arranging spaces around a cluster of central service ‘pods’ which concealed wet areas and worked around existing structure and building services stacks. Radiused corners to joinery and partition walls play the dual role of widening access intersections corridor pinch points, whilst simultaneously referencing and expressing the round column grid of the existing superstructure.

The existing winter garden glazing was removed and re-instated to a glazed balustrade sympathetic with the original Patten design. This allowed for improved cross ventilation and less reliance on mechanical cooling.

The material palette is a restrained composition of sheer textile, subtle marbles, mid tone timber veneers, mosaic tiles and limewash paints.

With plenty of bulkheads inherent in the existing structure, the lighter collection of finishes was intended to create the feeling of taller volume of space. By contrast, a dark and moody lobby with ornate light fittings have been selected to for that sense of drama on arrival.

Fitting out an apartment building can be deceptively complex both in design and execution. For this project, we teamed up with Dimpat who rose to the various access challenges on a build which was in essence limited to what one can fit in the lift.