It all started with a really nice view. Architects Ben Edwards and Nancy Beka of Studio Edwards tried to avoid the word “wall” when designing this 55sqm/592sqft Melbourne apartment, where connection – both inside and to the outdoors – is key.
“We are sort of designing the space without using the word walls where possible, so it’s more about what things can be so they have double uses”.
“When we design small spaces, we’re looking at maximising connectivity between spaces, at creating spaces through materials and changing levels, and at looking at spaces through volumes”.
Obviously there are lots of constraints that come with designing small spaces, but there’s also massive opportunity.
“We designed the space without using the word walls where possible, so it’s more about what things can be so they have double uses”, architect Ben Edwards of Studio Edwards told us of The Shrine, a 55sqm/592sqft apartment he designed alongside Nancy Beka. The cosy and interconnected central-Melbourne abode is a part-time home to Brian and Amy, a couple who splits their time between Tasmania and Melbourne. With Brian spending about half his time in the city for work, the space offers somewhere he can work from during the week and seconds as a weekend retreat for the couple and their kids.
The apartment, set in a 1960s or ’70s building, originally bore the conventional layout of a modern condo, with areas segmented off for sleeping and bathing. Setting the home apart from your everyday condo, however, is its expansive window looking out directly onto the Melbourne Gardens and the Shrine of Remembrance. And this made the vision for the redesign clear: reconnect the interior with the view by creating a warm and tactile and cosy space where, no matter where you were in the apartment, you’d always be connected to natural light and nature.
The redesign introduced a subtle yet dynamic shift in the layout. A transition from privacy at the back with the shower toward the communal area of the living room guides the general flow of the space, with an angled partition wall offering a means of adding some separation between the kitchen and the areas of relaxation. In fact, even though all essential functions are accounted for, the design in general places a priority on relaxation and pleasure, rather than strict utility. It is a choice that aligns with Edwards’s thinking on how the home doesn’t need to be a container for everything, and how we can learn to share in ownership and live with a little less, especially when there is “a whole myriad of exciting things in the city that you can go use”.
Still, it can be a container for some things, and in the case of Brian and Amy, one of those things was art. Amy’s large art collection, amassed in part through travel and family trips, became central to Edward and Beka’s design decisions, from the timber-walnut lined entrance wall, concealing storage, laundry, and an art alcove, to the brick feature wall in the living room that mimics the materiality of the nearby Shrine. In the bedroom, the structural column also presented an opportunity to create implied art niches, while over in the bathroom, some art is tucked among the joinery and storage. The scattered collection presented a means of adding some additional tactility, warmth, and personalisation to the space and helps to define it as their own.
With connectivity serving as an orienting principle behind the design, the layout is, of course, connected. Rather than just leaving a big open room, though, Edward and Beka had a bit of fun with it. The walls (when it could avoid it) do not span floor-to-ceiling, which, according to Edward, “makes it feel a lot bigger than the thing we started with”. At times when walls could not be avoided, such as between the bedroom and bathroom, tricks like a slide-open panel created a window to let them luxuriate in the Japanese soak tub with a direct view to the outdoors. Then, of course, there are those instances when you are only sometimes in need of a wall – like to block off the bed when you have guests – so Edward and Beka integrated a folding cardboard wall by MOLO for a flexible element of privacy.
In taking great care to create connections – between both internal space as well as between the inside and outside worlds – The Shrine residence offers a design that illustrates that small footprints need not feel small. As Beka puts it: “Obviously there are lots of constraints that come with designing small spaces, but there’s also massive opportunity”.
