2 Barry Street sits in a context of single-fronted Victorian terraces and small remnant industrial factories. Working on both architecture and interior design, our response picks up on the DNA of both, bringing these two typologies together into something new.
The building is arranged as two rows of townhouses. The front row faces the street, and a raised communal landscape at level 1 – accessed by a shared staircase – becomes the entry sequence for the back row. Car parking sits at ground level, with the front townhouses wrapping up and over it to, in essence, contain in the site while activating the street frontage.
The site faces west. Rather than treating this as a constraint, a series of shading strategies make it a defining feature of the building. Sliding timber shutters on the lower levels and hinged shutters on the upper floors let residents control the light. When closed, both reveal a burst of deep golden yellow. Ground-floor tenancies have cloth awnings in the same colour. The building steps down from four storeys to two along the street, responding to the shift in scale from the main street context to the residential one beside it.
The bulk of the building is in a classic reddish-blonde brick – a direct reference to the post-war housing that defines much of Brunswick. A smaller section at the end steps down further in a white-beige brick, mediating the transition to the Victorian terrace house next door. The brickwork plays with texture throughout – dimpled and hit-and-miss patterns that give the façade depth up close.
We were interested in the shop-with-residence-above typology – common in Melbourne and particularly in this part of Brunswick. The first few townhouses on the corner have full-height glazing to the street, leaving the ground floor open to potentially use as a small business. As the building moves toward a more domestic interface, the language shifts to front verandahs: a planter box, a series of columns, a raised timber deck. Each townhouse also has a roof terrace tucked behind the parapet, and an additional upper-level living space that acts as a winter garden – warm, light-filled and oriented to catch the low winter sun.
A key focus for the interior was exposing the CLT structure, which runs through the building including the staircases, paired with touches of warm native Australian timber flooring.
2 Barry Street,
Brunswick
21 townhouses designed for Milieu, and one of the first cross-laminated timber buildings in the country.
2 Barry Street, Brunswick, sits in a context of single-fronted Victorian terraces and small remnant industrial factories. Working on both architecture and interior design, our response picks up on the DNA of both, bringing these two typologies together into something new.
The site faces west. Rather than treating this as a constraint, a series of shading strategies makes it a defining feature of the building. Sliding timber shutters on the lower levels and hinged shutters on the upper floors let residents control the light. When closed, both reveal a burst of deep golden yellow.
A key focus for the interior was exposing the CLT structure, which runs through the building including the staircases, paired with touches of warm native Australian timber flooring.
Each townhouse also has a roof terrace tucked behind the parapet, and an additional upper-level living space that acts as a winter garden – warm, light-filled and oriented to catch the low winter sun.
