Tag: melbourne | ArchDaily

Shand Road Townhouse / Ys Housing

Pilar Caballero — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 03:00:00 +0000

Ys Housing's pilot project, Shand Road, refines medium-density infill housing in Melbourne's middle suburbs. Four two- and three-bedroom townhouses occupy a typical suburban block, testing a repeatable model for the 15-metre frontage lot type common in residential suburbs. The project prioritises design quality, environmental performance, and affordability. As both architect and developer, Ys Housing works across design, cost, and delivery. This integrated model allows housing to be more considered than volume-built products, while remaining more accessible than bespoke architecture.

Palace Coffee / Kerry Kounnapis Architecture Practice

Pilar Caballero — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 03:00:00 +0000

Blink, and you'll miss it. It's 8:25 am on a Thursday, and there's a line of people pouring out of Palace Coffee. Located down a Melbourne laneway at the base of Monaco House, it faces the Melbourne Club's fortress-like brick wall. It's an espresso bar, no seats, standing room only.

More Architecture for Less: SSdH and the Latent Potential of Existing Buildings

Miwa Negoro — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:30:00 +0000

Amid growing recognition of architecture's responsibility toward environmental and planetary ecologies, contemporary practice is increasingly oriented toward working with what already exists—its material, spatial, and historical conditions. Within this shift, architecture and design aesthetics are increasingly about reshaping inherited environments. This approach underpins the work of SSdH, a Melbourne-based architecture practice founded in 2020 by Todd de Hoog, Harrison Smart, and Jean-Marie Spencer. Working across scales of renovation, extension, and adaptive insertion, the studio consistently engages existing buildings as active agents. Winner of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, the Australian firm foregrounds environmental responsibility, material economy, and collaborative processes grounded in site-specific conditions.

9 Wilson Ave Apartment / MA+Co + Neometro

Miwa Negoro — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:00:00 +0000

9 Wilson Ave is a mixed-use, multi-residential building that completes the transformation of Wilson Ave in Brunswick, Melbourne, from a car-dominated industrial backstreet into a lively, pedestrian-friendly boulevard. The project provides 71 dwellings across multiple typologies, including 12 Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) apartments, 13 loft dwellings, four commercial tenancies, and four office suites. All dwellings are dual-aspect, engaging both the courtyard and surrounding streets to reinforce amenity, passive surveillance, and connection to place.

Studley Grounds / SSdH

Pilar Caballero — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:00:00 +0000

The new pavilion offers a space full of possibilities. The non-prescriptive area allows for flexible layouts to suit the changing needs of its users. It provides an additional area for the adjacent café to expand, host events, while also being open for the public to stop and sit within the landscape. Moving beyond shade and shelter, the space created is ambiguous as to whether it is private or public. This ambiguity affords a generosity to the surrounding national parkland and becomes a place that can be appropriated.

Kerr Apartment / SSdH

Pilar Caballero — Thu, 07 May 2026 03:00:00 +0000

When the Fitzroy landmark, The MacRobertson's Chocolate Factory (built ~1900's), was converted between 1998 and 2003, it became an early and local example of the industrial apartment building typology. Rather than delivering a series of homogenous, standardised units, the redevelopment divided the amalgamation of warehouse spaces into a series of apartment 'shells' surrounding a voluminous central atrium. The 'shells' were sold to owners with the most minimal amenities, no more than a connection point for plumbing, fire services, and power, with the understanding that occupants would be responsible for their own internal fit-out.

Stack & Field House / Steffen Welsch Architects

Miwa Negoro — Fri, 01 May 2026 02:00:00 +0000

Stack & Field is a small but generous extension of a 100-year-old weatherboard house on a tight inner-city block in Melbourne, Australia. It challenges a fundamental assumption of compact urban housing: that density requires consolidation. Located on a constrained and narrow site, the project plan dissolves layout and building form into a series of offset planes, layered rooms, and courtyards, and substitutes size for spatial richness.

Suupaa Restaurant and Convenience Store / IF Architecture

Valeria Silva — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:00:00 +0000

Enigmatic and eclectic, Suupaa is a first-of-its-kind, hospitality concept for a hybrid fast-casual Japanese restaurant and konbini convenience store. Acknowledging the cultural significance of 'konbinis' in Japan, the design for the venue extrapolates key aspects of the familiar typology into the modern fit-out, bringing forward ideas of utilitarian materials, fastidious organisation, efficiency, and innovation.

Around the Bend / Nigel Grigg Architects

Miwa Negoro — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 21:00:00 +0000

Around the Bend is both an extension to a timber Edwardian house built in the early 1900's and a separate but attached newly built Studio Garage Apartment building at the rear of the property on an unusual triangular piece of land.

House in a Garden / Edition Office

Pilar Caballero — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:00:00 +0000

There is something familiar in Grant Nimmo's paintings of lush, forested landscapes. The deeply enriching emotional response to being within the time, the temperature, the sounds, and the colours of the natural world. They depict, with a hauntingly beautiful degree of realism, the feeling of being within the complexity of spaces framed within a thickly planted landscape. Their existence today feels almost archival, as if they record an environment increasingly diminishing, still within reach, but only just. Spaces are connected, overlap, and peek out from behind trees. They shift and bend around the life and depth of the landscape. They are connected.

Northcote House / LLDS

Pilar Caballero — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:00:00 +0000

LLDS has re-conceptualised the Victorian terrace typology in response to the existing urban context to create a compact inner-city house in Melbourne, Australia. Sited on a narrow plot orientated east-west, 22m long and 4.6m wide, the main design move was to elevate the ground to form a roof garden to address the lack of garden spaces. The brown roof supports local ecology in an urban context. Below the free-form timber structure is a hall-like room with a kitchen, dining room, and entrance veranda reminiscent of the neighbourhood's large factory lofts and Victorian church halls. The highly textured concrete internal wall provides thermal mass and improves the dining room's acoustics by reducing the flutter echo effect caused by the parallel boundary walls.

LPS Residence / Davidov Architects

Pilar Caballero — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:00:00 +0000

LPS Residence is located on a large property on the Mornington Peninsula. The new home was designed to occupy the site of the original house that the family had outgrown. The architecture is conceived as 3 individually articulated building forms: the sleeping, living, and dining zones, which are clustered around a central entry courtyard.

Barkly House / Ha Architecture

Pilar Caballero — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Conceived during the pandemic through a series of discreet meetings, Barkly House is a brick home designed for the son of a bricklayer.

A House To Gather / Sibling Architecture

Pilar Caballero — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 04:00:00 +0000

A House to Gather is a project designed for the ultimate hosts. The young couple is renowned for their generous hospitality, opening up their home multiple times a week for everything from a quick aperitif to an expertly planned long luncheon. On a modest site and budget, this extension aims to match their generosity by giving them a new space to be with friends and family.

West Gate Tunnel / Wood Marsh

Miwa Negoro — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 02:00:00 +0000

As one of Melbourne's largest infrastructure projects, the West Gate Tunnel Project is an underground tunnel and above-ground link designed to relieve congestion on the West Gate Bridge and establish a direct connection to the City's western industrial port precinct. Crossing several waterways, the project's design narrative draws on a 60,000-year-old story of Indigenous communities fishing and harvesting eels along the Maribyrnong River. Post- colonial settlement maritime activity is also referenced through rope and cargo net motifs.

St Kilda Residence / ADDARC

Pilar Caballero — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 02:00:00 +0000

Located on a prominent north-facing corner allotment, with frontage to a primary road with tramlines and a quiet cul-de-sac, this inner southeastern site required a considered balance between creating street presence and scale commensurate with its position, whilst also establishing internal amenity and privacy for its occupants.

Haka House / Taouk Architects

Pilar Caballero — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 02:00:00 +0000

This captivating ensemble of form and design intent is a masterclass in creative storytelling, where every element converges to craft a unique narrative.

Thornbury House / Healy Ryan Architects

Pilar Caballero — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 02:00:00 +0000

The original house is a simple weatherboard bungalow with charming stained-glass windows and internal timber detailing. However, at the rear, an uninspiring renovation from a few decades past was not making use of the north-oriented rear yard. Our brief was to update the house to accommodate a young family and establish a richer connection with the surrounding landscape and garden.