When a site is zoned mixed use, the response is to build residences or commercial tenancies or some proportion of each type – this project allows for both uses to occur in the same space. A “flexible space”, complete with bathroom, kitchenette and storage is ready to accommodate a creative studio, a shop, an extension of the living area or even a car. 

The functional integrity of the project is its flexible spaces, they allow for multiple scenarios of work, live and socialising in the same space.  The ground and first floor flexible spaces are ready to accommodate a creative studio, a shop, or extension of the living area. In order to achieve the yield for commercial profit the building needed to be tall on this 188m2 south facing site. The average footprint for each townhouse is just 47m2. The project’s spatial configurations, which lead to flexibility of use, allows for a diversity of household types to occupy the townhouse over time.

Transparency at street level has been employed to promote opportunities for engagement between the private and public realm. The site’s small footprint meant the townhouse needed to borrow amenity from its surrounding context, to not only feel larger but to also enhance the benefits of what an inner city site has to offer. The southern orientation added to the challenge of getting light into the tall, narrow foot prints. The rhythms of the punctuating outdoor courtyards bring light into tall narrow voids. 

The project’s built form and external material palette takes its cues from the nearby industrial warehouses – an appreciation of the direct and honest material palette of masonry, glass and metal construction.  Also like its neighbouring influences, the project’s external surfaces hide more than they gives away, through a solid form with moments of punctuated windows offering framed views to nearby landmarks such as the north Melbourne Townhall clock tower, or cropped views of brick Victorian terraces and nearby trees. This modulation of solid and openness also filters sunlight and controls its exposure particularly to the west facing elevation. 

Designed to foster the benefits an inner city site has to offer; through both commercial and residential uses optimising the site’s opportunities rather than maximising them, there is balance in both density and liveability. The townhouse has an additional small kitchenette and lightweight wall that can be removed and re-instated at a small cost. The advantage being the spatial configurations this level can have that leads to flexibility of use within the overall townhouse for the inhabitants. The vertical dimension has been accentuated through the inclusion of a double-height void which gives the internal spaces a sense of openness.