❋Design
❋Design
Victoria Street Collective by Zen Architects
Six years ago, six families approached Zen Architects with a common goal—cultivating a residential environment, an inner-urban ecosystem, with communal living as its fixed star. Now complete, The Victoria Street Collective is home to ten resident groups and serves as a beacon of residential design. It is an adaptable playbook for future housing that prioritises architecture, design, sustainability, equity, and community.
Located in Brunswick, Melbourne, the Victoria Street Collective consists of two apricot stucco buildings facing north and south: one contains six apartments, and the other four. The residential mix includes two, three, and four-bedroom homes that, through the lens of design, defy the borders of the multi-residential vernacular to wholly reimagine inner-city living.
While each apartment is cohesive in its approach to prioritising outdoor connections, building biology and expansive volumes—soaring ceiling heights and spatial proportions of between 80-130m2 far exceed the standard—an emphasis on passive house principles applied in a bespoke manner reigns. Spatial planning is unconventional in its ambition for singular outcomes that yield purposeful, relevant and agile homes, some with studies, others with mezzanines and all with tangibly optimised liveability cast by considered touch points of the architectural process. The overarching aesthetic is consistent with Zen Architects' vision for an environment that prioritises communal living, outdoor space, and pleasingly utilitarian interior design freighted by an edited visual language.
Weaving throughout the Collective's built environment is a vibrant living plane of vegetable gardens, opportunistic plantings of herbs, seasonal fruit trees, communal gathering spaces and private terraces that seek to engage the senses and establish a place unlike anything else designed with such intention. The collective and architects' shared objectives and the prioritising of a reduced carbon footprint have led to a design where, in eschewing unnecessary off-street parking and private space, a resulting ecosystem has become the axis upon which the project is hinged.
Extending past its communal outdoor spaces, the Victoria Street Collective’s architecture is prescribed by the collective’s design, sustainability, functionality and performance ambitions, forming individualised homes that intuitively evolve modern living to establish a multi-residential design precedent. The exterior palette forges a discernible dialogue with nearby heritage buildings to create a harmonious colour story that celebrates the local architectural narrative while anchoring the new spaces in their historical context. Dual-aspect exposure to light and both private and communal gardens has sunlight lacquering walls by day and cross-breezes cooling summer nights. The two buildings have been carefully oriented to avoid overshadowing one another, thus maximising solar power generation—a critical aspect given the project’s environmental goals.
The design of the interior spaces reconciles flexibility and community connection. At the heart each home has a centrally positioned kitchen, which flows seamlessly into expansive dining and living areas, fostering a sense of togetherness and adaptability for diverse living patterns. This open design encourages spontaneous gatherings and shared experiences while accommodating individual privacy as needed. Natural materials, such as locally sourced plywood cabinetry and cork floors, add warmth and character and emphasise sustainability, economy and practicality. Each joinery element is crafted to stand alone through a modular approach, allowing for bespoke arrangements that shape each individual home.
Zen Architects' approach to The Victoria Street Collective is revolutionary, challenging the norms that define conventional apartment developments in terms of layout, mix, orientation, performance and the communal living vernacular. In embracing a vision that prioritises community and innovative design, the studio was able to unravel a complex tapestry of planning rules that typically constrain developers, manoeuvring through them with surprising ease. From the initial design stages, Zen was pivotal in synthesising architecture, sustainability, and construction methodologies, addressing every competing factor with finesse. Over the course of five years, the project’s ideals were established as anchors, crafting a collective of living spaces that enrich the intersection of design and community living, transforming the landscape of urban housing.
See more of Zen Architects' work on their website. Images by Tom Ross. Words by Tiffany Jade.
