This design incorporates the original church space housing an open plan living/meals and kitchen with butler’s pantry and formal living/home theatre room with side vestibule with panoramic views of the north- west garden, alfresco area and feature solar heated pool via vast floor to ceiling glazing. A mezzanine level within the volume of the church houses two huge bedrooms with built in joinery opening onto a rumpus room and adjacent bathroom overlooking the living room void and large arched window to valley views of the area.

The roof space within the timber trusses of the church has been converted into a New York-style loft space.  It is a multi-functional room with its own kitchenette and private bath room. Roof skylights and a circular floor to ceiling window encapsulate a panoramic view of the valley & city skyline.

This renovation looks amazing. The neutral palette, the wood and the bricks create a beautiful and modern place, definitely a great place to live.

The house has had a series of renovations over the past century; the original Edwardian home was converted into apartments in the 1930s and then a substantial family home in the 1980’s. The brief was to restore the Art Deco facade, retain the existing footprint and add a third level.

The house is located directly opposite the beach in Middle Park and is constantly filled with beautiful light. Morning sun strikes the garden aspect, and at the end of the day the sun sets across the bay.

The planning has been carefully considered to create a series of distinct rooms, rather than an open plan. Joinery is placed to create spaces, but still allow views to flow from room to room and then to the horizon.

Materials have been selected to provide understated tones within a neutral palette. The neutral colour palette supports the play of light at different times of day. The overall feeling is extremely soft and one feels visually and emotionally connected at all times to the expansive sea, sky and garden views. At the same time the house has a feeling of intimacy & warmth, perfect for family living.

The client’s original intention was to demolish the existing house and build a completely new structure. After living in the house for a year, the architects thought the existing building worked well with the views and light and had a distinct ‘personality’. In short, it would be a shame to demolish a house which had stood for 100 years.

Trades that existed 100 years ago, don’t exist anymore, or are considered too expensive. The architects therefore chose to restore the existing building and protect the craftsmanship of the Art Deco period.  So, the most substantial decision regarding sustainability was to work with the existing fabric of the house.

Once this decision was made, materials and servicing were all designed around principles of sustainability, including a smart managed hydronic heating system, double glazed windows, and positively shaded windows with curtains and screens.

The building uses only natural materials such as stone, and stained (not painted) timber, windows are either steel or timber, and not aluminium. Additional ESD attributes include solar hot water booted system, solar pool heating and rainwater harvesting for drip feed garden irrigation systems.

 Photographs  © Derek Swalwell

Ground Floor: 1 bedroom with courtyard, open plan study and second living room with original roller-door blind and full height operational door/windows, large bathroom with laundry, courtyard and lock up garage. Whole floor could easily be used as home office.

First Floor: Huge open plan living, dining, kitchen and meals area with expansive kitchen joinery, pantry, black mirrored splashback, stunning island bench area and extensive outdoor room-style entertainer’s courtyard.

Second Floor: Oversized master bedroom with city views, walk in robe and ensuite, 3rd bedroom, an amazing wrap around balcony and sun deck.

The Mechanics Institute Hall – think Victorian era guild or trades halls. Almost churchlike. This modern conversion plays with scale and height, positive and negative space, open and enclosed. Love the kitchen, the spiral staircase and the soaring grey ceilings, the clever use of half walls of storage to divide spaces and the privacy of the bedroom and bathroom tucked away in the mezzanine but a little confused by the large box like lights.

Here’s a video walkthrough:

It is being auctioned today, grab it while you can!

The redbrick you can see is the original house, and the grey part behind is all new!

Dark ceilings, lots of marble, very white, very European feel.

And a WOW garage! curtains and all…

Beautiful exterior choices,  successfully mixing old with new.

Established by John Knox, The Kirk was built in 1867 in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick. The building features brick polychrome which was at the height of its popularity during its construction. Alternating cream and umber brick mark the gear-tooth points and wrap the building in tiny quoins. The church became an icon for the community with its style being mimicked in a nearby substation as well as homes.

The clients had seen a Williams and Boag church conversion up-country and liked it. The raking floor had been retained there and, as here, a house fabric inlaid within an earlier church: not to replace, but to co-exist with that church and its legacy as a building that had once been the core of a community and its collective identity. It is a lot for a house to bear and here in the John Knox Elsternwick conversion the co-existence is finely balanced. Williams and Boag were determined that new fabric should be clearly distinguished from the old, perhaps feeling that producing the detail and texture of an older form by confusing the reading of an original casts the altered building into limbo homogeneity. The proposition is simple: new and old, rather than either/or. Accept the plurality and from its overlaps and clashes comes a new and particular unity in rhythms and episodes.

Inside, though the organ is gone, the kinetic heart of this church remains: in the floor raked to assist the congregation to gather, see and hear the delivery of the sermon; the planked dadoes stiff and stern, the satin glow of the timber ceiling and its spectacular trusses; the sudden and rich bounties of Ferguson and Urieâ€s stained glass; the near-black timber of the original floor and Elders†platform; and the massive core – a pulpit for announcing The Word, shifted about three metres from its original place.

How is this organised here? One senses the breath of Charles Moore, via Peter Williams†old colleague Kevin Borland, flowing through this design. The immediate encounter with this is through the expansion of perceived space with mirrors, an idea of John Soaneâ€s reworked by Moore, especially in his later designs. The bedrooms read as houses within a larger roofed volume, coupled to the stage-like sense of the platforms and enclosures inside. Cutting across the windows and corbels of the original church, they are all reminders that one is inside a very different building. Peter Williams, who worked on Borlandâ€s Paton house in 1970, is among those architects to explore Mooreâ€s buildings-within- buildings in Australian settings as an address of circumstance and a generator of the episodic.

The interior is also strongly theatrical in the sense of a stage setting for the family and its individual drama of movement and living. Robin Boyd, also interested by Moore, matched these themes in his Featherston house in Ivanhoe (1967), where a major platform-dominated volume is held in co-existence with added bedroom, bathroom and kitchen areas blistered outside into pods – or as Moore called them, ‘saddlebagsâ€. Here, these pods are the family room and kitchen area, and the bathrooms are drawn back into miniature house forms that envelop the bedrooms so the original church needed only one new opening to accommodate the house inside it.

The large garage at the front, with three bays and bench and work areas, is wisely set out as a separate building. With different texture and a hipped-roof variant, it has a quite different fabric from the church. A carport, linked to family rooms, is similarly clear of the original church. External additions are concentrated on the north.

The spread of the kitchen and family area is woven with lines traced out from the church buttresses. These lines cross a shallow moat with its stepped islands and kerbing, then a paved area to the swimming pool, before diving into the water and coming up the other side (this reworks High Victorian polychrome, which traditionally linked differing episodes and immediate context). These trace lines also run back in turn through the new plan inside the church. At ground floor they pick up the line of the laundry island (in a tall fold-away cupboard), the lift and bar storage, the bar, the dining room divider, the stairwell and each of the bedroom partitions.

The house component itself is necessarily complex. As Alex Selenitsch observed of Edmond and Corrigan, the client family in a house design is recognised as a group of differing parties: often competing and sometimes in alignment, a ‘body politic†with the variance and diversity of a community. We fixate on architectural post-modernism as a taste reaction that reinstates columns and styles, but we often forget its initial and long-gathering impetus: a perception of circumstance as of multiples and of parallel truths, where beauty in a buildingâ€s bearing lies most in the engagement of these conditions, rather than in their avoidance in finish, formal beauty and homogeneity.

The three bedroom house showcases an angular design partly hidden by a stone facade kept intact. An open plan kitchen combined with the dining and living room were constructed on the original part of the building. Beautiful stone walls merge with modern furniture to create an outstanding interior design. Replacement windows, sliding doors and skylights were carefully placed to ensure natural light in all rooms of the house. A rooftop deck offers beautiful panoramas of the city with its 360 degree view. Other features include a two car garage, cellar, gym, second living and study room. Tell us what you think about this creative mixture of styles or if you think something is missing in order to call this home desirable.

This luxurious family residence has an interesting split level floor plan, comprising 3 oversized bedrooms, all with an abundance of walk-in and wall-to-wall wardrobe space. Each bedroom suite is totally separate within the apartment ensuring privacy for you and your guests.

Two huge opulent bathrooms have the feel of a luxurious day spa. The gourmet kitchen is fit for a Master Chef with oodles of work bench space and storage plus an oversized gas cooker.

State of the art engineered double glazed windows along two street frontages, fitted with double electric blinds, secure optimum peace and quiet, whilst being in the very heart of everything Melbourne.

Living here, you bask in the reality that the hardest choices for you to make will be choosing the gourmet restaurant or cosy cafe or bar of your mood.