Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of the Kulin Nation
Victoria
This project adapts a modest 1960s mid-century house by restoring spatial clarity while retaining its low horizontal form. Planning reconnects living spaces to the garden, establishing a stepped sequence that culminates in a generous timber-lined dining area set directly on grade with the garden. From this grounded base rises a singular breezeblock tower, a carefully proportioned vertical companion.
Stacked concrete breezeblocks introduce pattern and shadow, forming a textured counterpoint to the original masonry. The tower reads as an inhabitable garden structure, offering curated glimpses of warm interiors as soft planting threads through its rational facade. Elevated rooms are lofty and breezy, providing quiet retreat—simultaneously outward-looking and intimate.
A restrained palette unifies old and new, allowing quiet alignment with its mid-century origins while adapting the home for contemporary living: a careful evolution privileging clarity, landscape connection and proportion, allowing architecture and garden to grow together over time.
Commendation For Residential Architecture – Houses (alterations And Additions)
Despite a lack of heritage overlay, Studio Bright have shown an exceptional respect for this 1960s, mid-century home, during a time where houses of this scale and era are routinely demolished to be replaced with larger homes that subsume the majority of their site. Internal re-organisation opens, expands and connects key living spaces and a renewed surrounding landscape. An additional breeze block garden tower counters the horizontal datum of the existing, holding a new living space at ground and bedroom retreat above with a wonderful immediacy to the elevated garden. Each careful intervention extends the possibilities for the existing building to generously house its growing family.
Commendation For Residential Architecture - Houses (alterations And Additions)
Despite a lack of heritage overlay, Studio Bright have shown an exceptional respect for this 1960s, mid-century home, during a time where houses of this scale and era are routinely demolished to be replaced with larger homes that subsume the majority of their site. Internal re-organisation opens, expands and connects key living spaces and a renewed surrounding landscape. An additional breeze block garden tower counters the horizontal datum of the existing, holding a new living space at ground and bedroom retreat above with a wonderful immediacy to the elevated garden. Each careful intervention extends the possibilities for the existing building to generously house its growing family.
Mel Bright, Principal and Design Director
Jaxon Webb, Project Architect/Associate
Tara Moore, Architect
Rob McIntyre, Director for Design Realisation
Metro Building Surveyors, Building Surveyor
Meyer Consulting, Structural Engineer
Peachy Green, Landscape Architect
Meyer Consulting, Civil Engineer