Nightingale Village

Bounded on all sides by Village neighbours, CRT+YRD (Hayball) has a more introverted character, ceding commercial frontage to a lone outpost of Duckett-facing ground-level residential (the “door-man’s house” was purchased by a studio member). At first glance, CRT+YRD’s internalized scheme might imply a reticence to embrace the wider project’s sense of collective possibility. But Hayball’s willingness to part with a piece of its site to ensure Leftfield was developable reflects a deeper level of coordination, manifest most literally in a common bike store and share-car park that runs below Urban Coup (Archi-tecture Architecture with Breathe), Leftfield, CRT+YRD and Skye House (Breathe). Hayball principal Bianca Hung explains that the central open-air courtyard enables “a sense of layering through the home . . . that is quite unique to our building.” Reminiscent of Nightingale 2 (Six Degrees, 2019), subtle articulation invites occupation of the shared access galleries while establishing a threshold to each dwelling, imbuing the larger apartment plans with a flexibility in program.

Perhaps the most imitated feature of Nightingale 1 is its rooftop garden, albeit reproduced without the laundry facilities that transformed it from sales tool to site of everyday neighbourly encounter. According to Madeline Sewall, director of houses at Breathe, a challenge at Skye House was “to make [the] rooftop work even harder across all seasons.” The response is a flexible, patio-like space that can be sealed off in colder months as a winter garden. Like nearby Nightingale Anstey (Breathe, 2022), the rooftop at Skye House also includes a surprisingly modest and utilitarian “bathhouse.” An important shared amenity for residents – especially families – forgoing access to private baths for reasons of cost and “inherited accessibility” (a shower-over-bath arrangement could represent a mobility challenge to future residents), the bathhouse also reflects the difference between the informed speculation of the Village versus truly deliberative projects. Briefs were adapted to preferences revealed via the Nightingale database and a building-by-building balloting process that functioned as a feedback loop, but the inherent limitations of off-plan development prevented future residents from actively negotiating meaningful individual trade-offs in favour of forms of communal luxury.

The one exception to this paradigm at the Village is Urban Coup, a raw but welcoming cohousing project that differs from the other buildings because the resident community existed prior to the purchase of the site, so no ballot occurred. Architecture Architecture design director Nick James notes that “to a certain extent, the architectural language of the building was less important than delivering a series of shared spaces and the ability for future amenity.” Urban Coup residents were heavily involved with the design, collaborating with the architects via a series of codesign workshops. The “heart and soul” of Urban Coup is a large communal kitchen and dining room that one imagines will, in the future, spill out into the semi-public mews created through the coordinated ground-floor setbacks of Urban Coup, Leftfield, CRT+YRD and Skye House.

This kitchen/dining room was also the only fully realized communal space at the time of writing. A guesthouse, multipurpose room, basement workshop and music room have all been provided as cold shells, with future fitouts designed but not delivered as part of the base build because of cost pressures. James reiterates that “once you’ve built the building, you can’t build those spaces,” which necessitates an approach that creatively anticipates the long life of the building and “how the cohousing community can allow those spaces to evolve.” There is something liberating in this acceptance of the unfinished that is suggestive of both the incremental development found throughout the Global South (and memorably embedded as a design strategy in Elemental’s “half a house” typology at Quinta Monroy in Chile) and the more familiar delayed gratification of alterations and additions to single family homes, subject to the drip-feed of savings replenished over time.

Urban Coup is notable too for its diversity in apartment types, reflecting a level of customization precluded elsewhere in the Village by the limitations of off-plan sales. Overall, the Village floorplans are surprisingly conventional, given the potential for experimentation in an architect-led project of this scale – although constrained by the narrow and deep infill parcels and deference to Nightingale Housing in shaping the apartment mix and price ceilings. The result is a focus on one- and two-bedroom dwellings and “Teilhaus” micro-apartments – an Existenzminimum product pitched as an affordable entry point into homeownership. Though admirable in redressing the lack of quality stock meeting the needs of Melbourne’s expanding pool of smaller households, with only 8 percent of apartments offering three or four bedrooms, the Village has effectively designed out the ability to accommodate a true cross-section of society (the titular village) and left Australia’s cultural aversion to higher density urban living for families and extended shared households unchallenged.

Purchaser ballots for the Village buildings (other than Urban Coup) were held in late 2018 and 2019. Around the same time, Nightingale Housing began its transition away from an “open source” licensing strategy toward an in-house development model, with architects engaged at arms-length instead of taking on development risk. Notwithstanding the merits of this shift, its fact marks out the Village as a one-off. Indeed, replicating the project using the same architect-as-developer model would not be financially viable given the readiness of the practices involved to effectively donate time that would usually be remuner-ated in a fee-for-service role. According to Maynard, “You look at the quality and the cost . . . there’s thousands of hours of donated time subsidizing that difference.” Cousins concurs: “A huge amount of sweat equity and pro bono hours have gone into delivering [the] project . . . I think the model did need to change.”

Given that change has now occurred, how should we assess the Village? For Nightingale Housing, it has been catalytic, enabling the organization to scale by attracting institutional capital. Indeed, future multi-architect projects are already underway. When asked what he would like to see at the Village in five years’ time, CEO Dan McKenna’s response was immediate: “A really healthy, thriving community . . . there’s so much connection within and across those buildings already.” In part, this early sense of life bleeding between buildings reflects the self-selecting nature of the Nightingale resident community, but it is also a product of the Village’s combination of distinct building-scale identities and collective precinct-scale planning. If we accept Portman’s assertion that increased agency for the architect-as-developer is found in “designing the city,” then it is the latter that may prove to be the Village’s ultimate legacy. While less eye-catching than an assemblage of stylistic signatures, in time the ambiguous approach to boundaries and sense of responsibility to a wider public could suggest new approaches to neighbourhood-scale development.