Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of the Kulin Nation
Victoria
The SDA Housing Project comprises two purpose-designed Robust homes for Disability Homes Victoria, conceived as a pilot to demonstrate how architectural quality can improve everyday living while supporting durability. The project resolves complexity within a modest residential form through robust construction and discreetly integrated services, balancing safety while ensuring the spaces read as a home rather than an institutional environment.
Generous living spaces with raked cathedral ceilings create a sense of openness and comfort. Relationships to landscape are prioritised throughout, with planted outlooks and courtyards that offer retreat. Colour and delight are introduced in the bathrooms, moving away from the typically clinical approach.
Set within a suburban context, the building holds a quiet residential presence, balancing openness with privacy and offering small civic gestures. The project seeks to operate as a modest precedent for delivering this demanding housing typology with dignity, generosity, and care for residents and their support workers.
Award Residential Architecture – Multiple Housing
Studio Bright’s SDA Housing stands as a robust exemplar of thoughtful design, balancing accessibility requirements while prioritising dignity, warmth, and joy for its residents.
The project’s strength lies in its spatial planning, accommodating both the intimate needs of residents and the operational demands of care staff. Robust materials create durable and welcoming environments, deliberately avoiding institutional aesthetics in favour of domestic warmth and character. Strategic use of colour and texture throughout reinforces this residential quality. The design cleverly integrates into the residential streetscape as a single home, concealing multiple front doors and egress paths behind a cohesive architectural language.
A highly considered landscape approach anchors the design, with carefully directed views to the gardens providing both privacy for residents and connection to nature. These green spaces become integral to daily life, supporting wellbeing while enhancing the building’s integration with its neighbourhood context.
Strong sustainability measures and comfort strategies are woven throughout. The project serves as a template for future SDA developments, proving that specialist accommodation can deliver dignity and quality of life while meeting complex regulatory requirements. In doing so, it establishes a new benchmark for housing that serves its most vulnerable residents with architectural excellence and genuine care.
Award Residential Architecture - Multiple Housing
Studio Bright’s SDA Housing stands as a robust exemplar of thoughtful design, balancing accessibility requirements while prioritising dignity, warmth, and joy for its residents.
The project’s strength lies in its spatial planning, accommodating both the intimate needs of residents and the operational demands of care staff. Robust materials create durable and welcoming environments, deliberately avoiding institutional aesthetics in favour of domestic warmth and character. Strategic use of colour and texture throughout reinforces this residential quality. The design cleverly integrates into the residential streetscape as a single home, concealing multiple front doors and egress paths behind a cohesive architectural language.
A highly considered landscape approach anchors the design, with carefully directed views to the gardens providing both privacy for residents and connection to nature. These green spaces become integral to daily life, supporting wellbeing while enhancing the building’s integration with its neighbourhood context.
Strong sustainability measures and comfort strategies are woven throughout. The project serves as a template for future SDA developments, proving that specialist accommodation can deliver dignity and quality of life while meeting complex regulatory requirements. In doing so, it establishes a new benchmark for housing that serves its most vulnerable residents with architectural excellence and genuine care.
It is encouraging to see this project realise the initial ambition to use purposeful design to achieve improved outcomes for residents. The homes successfully respond to residents’ complex needs while providing spaces that feel homely and safe. It is refreshing to see this type of housing approached with care and intent, moving beyond a minimum-compliance mindset. The project offers an important opportunity to understand how design can be critical in improving residents’ quality of life while minimising damage and maintenance costs. It can also serve as a case study to inform future approaches to this much-needed type of housing.
Melissa Bright, Principle and Design Director
Rob Hillman, Project Architect/Associate
Tara Moore, Architect
Maryna Popova, Graduate of Architecture
Grace Upton-Jones, Graduate of Architecture
Emergent Studios, Landscape Architect
Meyer Consulting, Structural Engineer
Meyer Consulting, Civil Engineer
BSA Building Surveyors, Building Surveyor
EMC Group, Services Engineer
RED Fire Engineers, Fire Safety Engineer
DDEG, ESD Consultant
Arbkey, Arborist
3D Access, SDA Assesor
Aerotight, Airtightness Consultant