The piece unpacks how small measurements – a metre here, a few centimetres there – shape the way people live in apartments and move through cities. Drawing on Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, the article includes a conversation with Rob Adams AM, alongside our director Quino Holland.

For 38 Albermarle, developed with Assemble, we replaced the typical double-loaded corridor with an open-air walkway that cuts through the building. The shift does two things at once: it brings cross-ventilation and daylight to every apartment, and it makes room for the kind of incidental contact that builds neighbourliness. Built-in bench seating, vertical lightwells, and a metre or two of private verandah at each front door give residents somewhere to pause, plant something, or stop and talk.

They’re small gestures, but ones we’re always adding to. As Quino puts it in the article, “I think the most important tool an architect can deploy is empathy. It’s about making sure that we’re not narrowing down people’s possibilities when they move into an apartment, but actually broadening them.”

Good apartment design isn’t necessarily about adding more – it’s about giving people the space to live fully, at any age and stage. As Quino notes, designed well, an apartment can hold a growing family, pets, friends and a life that changes over time.

You can read The Meaning of a Metre on the Never Too Small website, or pick up a copy of the magazine via the Never Too Small online store.

Designed for South Australian developer Otello, the 10-storey mass timber building will deliver more than 100 one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, hospitality spaces, and a multi-level health and wellness centre with pilates, hot and cold pools, saunas and physical therapy facilities. The site sits opposite the award-winning Plant 4 Bowden market hall and frames the Bowden Village Reserve, with activated frontages on all three sides.

Rather than treating wellness as a ground-floor amenity, the design integrates it through the building’s full section — with generous breezeway corridors, cross-ventilated apartments with light on two sides, and full-width balconies. The expressed mass timber structure carries through from exterior to interior, with the timber shell contributing to both the building’s environmental performance and its spatial character.

Twenty percent of the yield is allocated to affordable housing through Home Seeker SA, exceeding the 15 percent planning requirement. Sixteen apartments will provide specialist disability accommodation. The project is targeting a 5-Star Green Star rating.

Construction is expected to begin mid-2026.

Read the full article at ArchitectureAU.