C.F.Row at 237 Napier Street sits within the rich urban fabric of Melbourne's oldest inner city suburb of Fitzroy, a bricolage of building types and scale, 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, which uses the original brick façade of the former building. A new row of low-scale collaged brick and concrete town houses form a rhythmic ensemble to northern boundary along the Exhibition graffiti laneway, formulating a conversation between the existing low-scale Victorian row-houses to the north. The central east-west laneway besides the townhouses allows the architecture to grow gradually towards the higher density dwellings to the south. Expanding upwards towards a lightweight aluminium piano nobile veiled by a filigree of metallic louvres and ending the crown with an exclusive collection of metal cladded penthouses framed by a garden terrace. The neighbouring street fabric permeates through the site as a series of laneways, formulating to the internal site circulation, mediating between the scale of form within the site and connecting back to its community.
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