In the Domain Precinct beside the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, MORQ has built 49 Walsh Street, ten apartments for Neometro across four levels, ringed by a planted buffer.
49 Walsh Street sits in South Yarra, on a block of the Domain Precinct where the Royal Botanic Gardens, the running track known as the Tan and the shopfronts of Domain Road all fall within a few minutes on foot. By the standards of the Melbourne apartment market it is a small building, ten residences across four levels. It is also the outcome of an international competition, which is not how buildings of this size usually get commissioned.
The winner was MORQ, a practice founded in Rome with a second studio in Perth, working here for Neometro, the longest standing of Melbourne’s design-led development groups. The pairing explains the building’s temperament. Neometro brought the site and the brief. MORQ brought a European habit of working geometry hard, of letting proportion carry the load that decoration carries elsewhere.
The most consequential move is not inside. A landscaped perimeter by Mud Office wraps the building and holds it back from the street, acting as a buffer against the urban context. It does three jobs at once: it balances openness against privacy, it frames the view from each apartment, and it lets daylight reach all ten. The mature canopies already standing on the street do the rest, so the garden carries through from the footpath, into the planting, and on into the rooms.
The palette indoors is short. Walls take a custom earth render, trowelled by hand, a finish that keeps the trace of the person who applied it. Against that sit timber, bronze and stone travertine. None of those materials is unusual on its own. What is unusual is the discipline of stopping there, of letting a wall be a wall and a stone be a stone rather than layering the finishes a Domain Precinct address would ordinarily invite.
The interiors are set out with generous ceiling heights and full-height doors, the cheapest and most effective way to make an apartment behave like a house. Joinery runs long and absorbs most of the storage, which frees the living areas from the furniture that otherwise accumulates along walls. Proportion again, rather than floor area, doing the work.
Melbourne has no shortage of towers sold on amenity. What 49 Walsh Street proposes instead is that ten apartments, well proportioned and properly planted, can hold their own beside one of the city’s great gardens without competing with it. The building draws on European geometry and still reads as thoroughly Australian, which is less a contradiction than a description of how this city has always built.
