2024 Gallery
Winner: Apartment or Unit
Neometro for 57 Martin Street
57 Martin Street is a collection of six architecturally designed townhouses in the heart of Thornbury. Each townhouse includes three bedrooms, spacious living and dining areas for entertaining, off-street parking, and private gardens by Mud Office. Future focused and carefully crafted, these homes are designed to promote sustainable living.
Jury Citation
As our cities shift to support greater densities, mid-scale apartment and terrace projects play an important role in delivering diversity to our housing stock – enabling us to live happily closer together. Offering as much as necessary and as little as possible, 57 Martin Street is an incredibly successful example of design excellence and simple living. The townhouse – one of six – provides a living environment that is simple, elegant, robust and low maintenance. Oriented east–west, the design takes advantage of aspect and delivers excellent cross-ventilation outcomes.
Parking is grouped at the laneway entry, accommodating the immediacy of carparking desires while also permitting future conversion to garden space or more housing when private vehicle usage declines. Simple strategies such as deep soil planting and architectural curb appeal have been prioritised, elevating the building’s suburban condition. Cost has been managed by employing brick detailing to the street edge, while limiting its extent along the boundary edges – in the same way that heritage high street shopping strips present grandeur to the street and pragmatism to the lanes behind.
This type of housing is hard to make good, and 57 Martin Street is an excellent example of architectural integrity underpinning a sophisticated but affordable housing outcome.
