High Street Apartments

The High Street Apartments is Gardiner Architects’ first high-rise multi-residential project. Located in Thornbury, Melbourne, the project is a mixed-use building, with thirteen apartments above a ground floor carpark and restaurant fronting High Street.

Inside the apartments, the palette is warm with splashes of colour, while still restrained enough to allow future residents to add their own style to the spaces. With long-term occupation in mind, opportunities for storage are maximised so that growing families can expand within the space. A single central, open stairwell wraps around the lift. The south stair façade is built with glass bricks so that gentle natural light can wash into the space.

When homes are stacked vertically, the stairwell and rooftop garden are places of impromptu interaction and community connection.

The building employs prefabricated crosslaminated timber (CLT) construction to achieve a more sustainable outcome, with the apartments achieving an 8.4-star rating on average. This building methodology allowed for greater flexibility of layout, with each level and apartment a completely individual design responding to the varied orientation, size and aspect of each apartment. Overall, the High Street Apartments see a very liveable outcome, that responds to its context and exemplifies the need to test and develop new, more sustainable construction methods in Australia.

Project Credits

Architect Gardiner Architects

Builder Sinjen Group

Building Surveyor Jaz Building Surveying

Land Surveyor Goodison

Quantity Surveyor MBM Quantity Surveyors

Structural Engineer 4Site Engineers

CLT Engineer Vistek

Acoustic Engineer Octave Acoustics

Fire Engineer Red Fire Engineers

Geotechnical Engineer GeoAust

Project Size 2068 m2

Site Size 471 m2

Year Completed 2022

Building Levels 5

The longevity of the apartments was important. The architects were interested in using materials in their natural form, rather than applying a surface treatment that might chip and wear poorly over time. The architects used timber where possible, especially in the corridors and lobbies, to be inviting and create warmth rather than a sterile white environment.

The idea was to essentially make the project a collection of stacked homes, each with its own sense of presence, unique layout and designed to respond to its outlook and orientation.

The unrepeated floor plans generate an irregular façade that breaks up the scale of the building and provides definition.

The articulation of the form comes from the recessed balconies and the varied pattern of the windows – there was no need to apply decorative elements or a plethora of materials to break up the mass.