2019 Commended - Multi-Residential
2 St Georges Road is our take on a classic walk-up apartment type. The building is arranged as a U-shape – apartments wrap around a central fern garden and outdoor circulation space, so every apartment gets crossflow ventilation and light on both sides.
The site faces north, west and south-west, with a busy road on its boundary. To manage the light and noise, we wrapped the building in a fully operable, bifolding aluminium mesh façade. Residents open or close their own panels depending on the conditions – so the building looks and performs differently from morning to evening, and season to season. The expanded mesh filters rather than block the view out, giving each apartment a dappled outlook to the street.
The ground floor is a brick podium, a choice that connects the building materially to the single-storey brick context around it. The fire stair and circulation stair are combined into one external staircase with a curved profile that rises out of the fern garden and connects the levels.
The locking mechanism for the façade panels was resolved with a simple solution. Rather than specifying a complex imported system, we worked out that an elastic cargo strap – the kind used to tie loads down on a ute – does the job simply and reliably. It’s a straightforward answer to what could have been an overcomplicated problem.
We worked with Flack Studio on the interiors and the ground-floor hospitality space. The lobby opens directly onto the fern garden through operable glazing, pulling natural light and air into the arrival sequence.
2 St Georges Road,
Fitzroy North
A four-storey apartment building with a ground-floor hospitality space, designed for Milieu.
The site faces north, west and south-west, with a busy road on its boundary. To manage the light and noise, we wrapped the building in a fully operable, bifolding aluminium mesh façade. Residents open or close their own panels depending on the conditions – so the building looks and performs differently from morning to evening, and season to season. The expanded mesh filters rather than block the view out, giving each apartment a dappled outlook to the street.
We worked with Flack Studio on the interiors and the ground-floor hospitality space. The lobby opens directly onto the fern garden through operable glazing, pulling natural light and air into the arrival sequence.
