North Perth Housing

Overview

This project is a speculative apartment building in the northern suburbs of Perth. Located on the original site of a building company known for the construction of residential houses in the area with vivid blue, green and black tiled roofs and contrasting white rendered facades and painted iron balustrades.

This project seeks to capture the quality of their original housing type, use the surrounding subdivision format that is so pervasive in the area, but radically scale it up to a 40 unit apartment building, where everyone lives under the one roof.

Services

Lead consultant, feasibility, master planning, brief development, concept design

Details

Planning

Through discussions with the City of Stirling, we used this project as a test model for the State government’s new Design WA Guidelines. The guidelines follow what has been achieved in other states like NSW and Victoria for sometime. This project design process intended to review the guidelines, explore what building typologies can work within their requirements, what typologies are appropriate in Perth and what performs even better.

To that end, the ‘big-house’ format for apartments achieves a higher percentage of naturally ventilated apartments - drawing air through balconies and vented through skylights; more direct day lighting in apartments; more outdoor amenity and shared communal space and a unique internal apartment typology with higher internal volumes.

Construction

The building intends to make the most of known construction methods of the area, including subdivision housing types and simple building detailing, just bigger! This way we can focus on the amenity and the sustainable credentials of the interiors and external landscape.

Format

The building achieves at grade car parking concealed by units along the street and grade changes along Flinders St. The apartment building is conceived of as a large pitched roof ‘single level’ housing type. The apartment block is 3 levels, but its receding form presents a smaller scale to the street and significantly reduces overshadowing to neighbours.

The roof form is opened up by subtracting courtyards spaces to reveal the buildings interiors and apartment mix, giving them a direct relationship to various private and shared courtyards, whilst responding to changing ground levels and retaining large existing eucalypts on site. The format also allows day lighting and ventilation to corridors and lift lobbies and creates numerous private balconies, without overlooking.

The building achieves forty units in total, mostly 2 bedroom units but with a mix of 1 and 3 bedroom apartments in line with Commercial advice.