A new mid-rise Apartment building in Brunswick East, which boarders both an expansive park to its rear and busy inner city road connecting into Melbourne CBD.

Ground level into the adjoining park provides terrace style apartments which formally celebrate the curved bay style windows of local Victorian vernacular in nearby streets.

The Nicholson Street elevation provides two ground floor commercial tenancies with a central arrival point for the apartments.

Level 01 uses winter gardens to provide privacy and relief from noise from the busy road.

Upper level silver-top ash timber balconies have embedded curved concrete planters for privacy and provide a green edge to views out.

The building has been designed to not rely on the ‘green’ planters but to use them as an additional benefit, only to further enhance the facade composition.

The buildings materiality, in its pink-red concrete finish is a nod to the pinky-red colour tones of the C Butler bricks from the local area - specifically the now Jones Park, Butler’s Brickworks which was established in 1857.
The very obvious answer was to design the building in brick, however given these original bricks are no longer in production and as a result we didn’t want to use just any brick - the thing we really loved about the C Butler bricks were the colour tones in the sun. We therefore opted for an abstraction of this narrative and instead used an oxidised pink-red concrete, which also created a more singular and cohesive reading of the buildings formal identity - which we found more complementary to the surrounding context than adding another material to the ‘library’ of materials used in adjacent buildings.