Traditional Land Owners: The Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation

Lothian is a speculative development on an island site in North Melbourne. The housing mix is unusual, consisting of six four storey plus roof garden strata titled townhouses and two stacked two-storey apartments, one with a roof garden.

The design was inspired by the North Melbourne context – local examples of nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial buildings – handsomely scaled edifices of manufacturing’s golden age. Red bricks, the dominant material of these reference buildings, informed the material expression of our building, manifesting grand scale with texture and fine-grained detail.

The balancing of formal expression and high-quality domestic space into a single architectural expression in a legible, logical, convincing and practical sense is the success of the project, but we also wanted it to be sustainable – a robust building, flexible to adaptation, energy efficient and comfortable. And beautiful – in the sense of being a valued part of the urban realm.