Northcote runs on its grain: Victorian and Edwardian terraces and timber cottages stepped along the hill toward High Street, corner shops that became houses, and a strip that has watched every one of the suburb's reinventions. The blocks are mostly narrow, the neighbours are mostly close, and the houses are mostly older than anyone alive. Making homes like these work for the way people live now is not generic architecture; it is a discipline of its own.
In Alphington, next door, the practice took an early-1900s Gothic Revival church and its hall through a Darebin planning approval that a previous designer had already failed once, and delivered eight dwellings across the one site: three in the church, two in the hall, three new at the rear. That was 2006, approval in seven months, and it remains the kind of project this council remembers you for. The blocks are narrower on your street, but the council, and our respect for how it works, are the same.
Replanning cellular interiors, mining light from side setbacks and roofs, keeping the front rooms the street expects.
Where the design lives or dies on section drawings and neighbour sightlines.
Barbara lectured building science for around a decade, and her position is practical rather than ideological: mixed-mode comfort, openable windows, insulation and orientation doing the quiet work; old buildings allowed to breathe. Performance you feel, not a scoreboard.
That hold their own on old streets.
Where a block might carry more.
For protected properties, next.
The Heritage database, permit exemptions and design guides.
How to talk to the council before you lodge.
The state register.