The footprint barely moves at Tucker, a former manufacturing warehouse in Fitzroy North, Melbourne, where SSdH draws light into the plan with a raised courtyard, an angled atrium and a steel mesh stair tower.
Tucker works as an open framework, fluid on purpose, with room for residential, creative and curatorial use that can change with whatever the owner needs next. Most days it is a home. On others it takes a party, an exhibition or an event, which makes it, in the studio’s phrase, “a multifunctional, chameleon-like building”. Among the Victorian terrace houses that fill most of the neighbourhood, it is already unusual.
SSdH puts the arrival in four words: “Entry is deliberately compressed.” A garage lined in galvanised steel comes first, then a timber door, then the space opens all at once into an atrium void six metres high, flooded with daylight. Upstairs, circulation wraps around, the bedrooms and bathrooms are held apart, and the floor stays open and adaptable.
The raised, planted courtyard is central. It brings the ground level up inside the building, moves the line between inside and outside and sends daylight further into the plan, while the living spaces, ringed by the warehouse’s own walls, seem lodged in the site. The double-height glazed atrium carries the courtyard on to the centre of the building, set at a careful angle to the old warehouse grid so northern light reaches inner rooms once left dark.
The renovation keeps the industrial fabric in plain sight. The original roof trusses were cut, reshaped and welded back together around the new void, still legible, still load-bearing. Old paint lines stay on the steel, on purpose; commercial glazing, exposed bolts and plates of milled aluminium mark what is new. In the main living space the kitchen island is a travertine monolith, paired with cabinetry in stainless steel and Spotted Gum, and built-in sofas run around the room beneath the raised courtyard, an informal place to live, work and entertain.
Only from the roof terrace, reached by a stair tower at the front, does the project look directly out, far over Melbourne and its suburbs. Lightweight, built of Webforge steel mesh and tucked under the old bullnose roofline, the tower stands where a makeshift glass enclosure once hid the heritage façade. In the studio’s words, “Rather than presenting as a solid object, the tower acts as a permeable veil.” Its galvanised finish takes on the changing colours of the laneway, so it never looks quite the same from two angles.
There is no gas; the building runs on electricity alone. A heat pump supplies hot water and the hydronic underfloor heating, rooftop solar helps meet daily demand, EV charging is installed and provision is made for battery storage later. Keeping most of the structure, with its boundary walls and openings, sharply cuts embodied carbon and construction waste; roughly 80 per cent of the demolition material went into established recycling streams. The warehouse is not preserved as a relic. SSdH works with its structure, material history and flaws, and leaves an open-ended framework for many uses and a longer life.
