Fitzroy Lane House

A house in an unforgiving laneway context has been imagined as a robust, simplified form- a container for family life principally concerned with providing refuge. The tight vertical space is ameliorated through a memorable threshold and ascent rising to the principle living areas and opening to a startling city prospect.

The context for this house is the back of all the adjacent properties. This required a particular response, an architecture which wouldn’t diminish the unique urban design quality of the laneway - so important to the history of inner city Melbourne. We were also conscious of being expressive of new forms of inhabitation. Our approach eschewed overly domestic representations of punched-hole doors and windows, decorative detail and conventional thresholds, and rather deployed a reduced palette of tough materials in undifferentiated abstract planes to make an architectural object which is resonant with the context, yet distinct from it.