The Site
Beyond Housing – a community housing provider in regional Victoria – contacted us to ask for assistance in developing a residential complex in the rural city of Shepparton. Having previously collaborated with Beyond Housing on another social housing project in Wangaratta and seeing their true passion for helping people in need, we were thrilled to sign on to this project.
Beyond Housing had purchased an empty paddock in a residential estate in Shepparton, chosen to be the site of the new community housing complex. It had been sitting unused for decades and, due to its proximity to the local hospital, schools, and university, the Greater Shepparton City Council was keen to see it developed into housing for vulnerable community members.
The Brief
This community housing project was a joint venture between BY Projects Architecture, Beyond Housing, Sessions Builders, and The Peter & Lyndy White Foundation. Beyond Housing and The Peter & Lyndy White Foundation are organisations dedicated to supporting homeless and vulnerable Victorians through the supply of affordable rental dwellings in Victoria. Everybody was keen to see the success of this new development.
Our goal as architects was to design a precinct that was warm, inviting, comfortable, and social. Creating a sense of community is a huge part of any housing project, so the spatial arrangement, amenities available, and open areas needed to be designed to encourage informal interactions between residents and strengthen the community bond.
Being a rural city, the new development needed to be of manageable scale and work efficiently with the existing infrastructure. A maximum of two storeys was imposed for the development, and it would need to fit in with the existing low-rise neighbourhood of this part of the city.
The Design
Since the site was already within a residential estate, we needed to take a lot of care in ensuring the final design was properly integrated into the neighbourhood. We took cues from the geometry and materials of existing houses in the area to develop a design language which informed the architecture. Brick and corrugated steel cladding were used for the exteriors, which provided a familiar character to the precinct.
Taking into consideration the constraints of Shepparton as a rural city, we decided on a set of one and two-storey townhouses as not to require extensive new plumbing and electrical infrastructure. These constraints ultimately benefitted the project, since we could design a simple, yet reliable structure for each townhouse that was very economical to build.
We wanted a community housing precinct that appeared welcoming and familiar to the community. We achieved this by orientating the front dwellings to the street rather than facing internally and providing wide paths between blocks. This also let us maximise sunlight to internal spaces, reducing the reliance on artificial lighting thus reducing power consumption.
The result of our work, in addition to the efforts of Beyond Housing, the Peter & Lyndy White Foundation, and Sessions Builders, was a warm, inviting, safe, and social precinct that many people will be able to call home.
