It’s a acquainted conundrum in bayside Melbourne. How finest to open an insular home on a decent web site for a sociable household, embracing coastal mild and views and including panorama to a densely populated streetscape?
Fox Corridor Home on Bunurong Nation, between the bay and the reclaimed swampland of Albert Park Lake, is an attractive response by BKK Architects, Mud Workplace Panorama Design and design-savvy shoppers. The undertaking was just lately shortlisted for the 2025 Australian Institute of Architects 2025 Victorian Award for Residential Structure – Homes (Alterations and Additions).
The design retains the formal symmetry of a heritage facade, refreshing the unique entrance rooms and totally reimagining the rear. A curved addition of stone, wooden and glass introduces overlapping interstitial areas for eating, cooking and dwelling at floor degree, and transforms a beforehand windowless, skylit attic right into a fundamental bed room with a vertical backyard. The consequence removes thresholds, blurs boundaries and introduces a suitably tidal stream between indoors and out for fogeys, a teen, a pooch and common company.
Drawing on modernist ideas of spatial effectivity and panorama connection, “the typology [BKK] settled on fairly early was the courtyard home,” says undertaking architect Vaughan Howard. “We conceptualised it inside this fluid panorama, the place you see a wall of the constructing peel round to basically turn into a backyard wall. Over time, inexperienced vegetation take it over.”
Internally, the hardworking joinery morphs to create areas for every thing from keys and coats to a bar and stereo alongside the journey from the entrance door to the rear. Stone flooring and timber ceilings prolong into the courtyard, maximising ambiguous edges. These expansive horizontal planes are impressed by “coastal landscapes and interested by a refuge beneath an escarpment or a sandstone cliff edge,” Vaughan explains. “The concept you’re dwelling below a ledge relatively than inside partitions or caught below a ceiling was a powerful driver for the ground-floor areas.”
Upstairs, the principle retreat “turns into virtually a clifftop house,” provides BKK principal Simon Knott. It’s opened to spectacular metropolis views by a raised facade softened by cascading planting by Mud Workplace. “The shoppers needed to contribute one thing again […] as they opened as much as neighbouring properties in a very dense locality,” he says.
