Connect Parkville

Connect Parkville joins a stately but dated Victorian house and a derelict outbuilding into a single five-bedroom home, set within a visually intact but functionally stressed conservation area in Melbourne. Rather than demolishing the failing extension for a clean slate, Steffen Welsch Architects made one decisive move: a new glazed atrium that stitches the two disparate buildings together and reorganises how the family lives.

The brief asked for better daylight, improved thermal comfort and a stronger connection to the outdoors, while accommodating both private and communal family life. The centrally placed atrium answers this with multiple access points and a transitional, circulatory heart to the home. Spaces are reassigned around it: the family room becomes a meeting room, the kitchen and laundry a workspace, and the living and sleeping areas a retreat. The children's wing is now separated from the parents', and a sunny new courtyard provides privacy from the street.

The insertion is intentionally quiet, relying on scale and contrast rather than historic reference. Layers of light materials, timber and glass over masonry, give the new volume mass without heaviness, with sunlight penetrating opaque glass. The cladding contrasts with the surrounding historic brick while reflecting on its context, holding old and new as equals. Applying a curtain wall and a glass-clad roof to a domestic project demanded close collaboration with all stakeholders and custom engineering to keep the roof compliant, affordable and true to the architectural intent. Completed in 2016.

Architecture by Steffen Welsch Architects. Photography by Rhiannon Slatter.