Laneway in HiFi

This project was shaped by a compact 392m² corner block in Millswood negotiating planning constraints, a south-facing yard, and a access laneway overlooked by neighbouring properties. The existing home was to be retained, limiting structural and planning flexibility. The challenge was to deliver a comfortable, energy-efficient family home that maximised northern light, created usable outdoor space, and balanced openness with privacy. The brief called for spatial clarity, daily functionality, and room for collections of music and wine reflecting the owners’ contrast of structured lives and expressive, punk-influenced passions.

The home reorients to the laneway, transforming a back-of-house edge into a social frontage. A new addition runs toward the southern boundary, drawing northern light into the courtyard and living areas. Amenities are placed centrally for efficient circulation, while private zones remain in the retained heritage footprint. Two anchors define the social core: a HiFi station restoring the lost ritual of flipping through records like browsing a music store and displays album covers as part of the living space; and the kitchen that frames sky and trees through operable louvres. A fading brick gradient gestures to the laneway.

Laneway in HiFi reframes suburban living through spatial clarity, passive sustainability, and cultural connection. The home maintains year-round comfort with minimal energy use, using passive ventilation, thermal mass, and electrification to reduce living costs. It activates the laneway as a soft public edge, offering subtle interaction with the streetscape. Internally, it supports rituals of music, food, and gathering, turning everyday moments into intentional experiences. Culturally, it embeds analogue habits music, cooking, collecting into the architecture itself. The project proves that compact suburban sites can deliver low-impact, high quality homes that are rich in identity and generous in experience.

• Laneway Activation: The design reorients the home to face a service laneway, creating a social threshold and drawing light and community into daily life setting a precedent for overlooked suburban edges providing strong pedestrian connections to the abundant local amenity. • Community Impact / Visual Gesture : A fading brick gradient transitions from pickets to red brick blending to white, softening the edge while referencing heritage context and solar performance. It reads as both detail, public gesture and activation to a secondary home frontage. • HiFi Station as Social Anchor: A dedicated joinery unit restores the ritual of flipping through records, making music a tactile, daily interaction. Album covers are displayed as art within the living space. Much like the fading experience of searching for music in a store. • Spatial Efficiency: The home’s compact footprint (392m² site) is resolved through careful planning—wet areas centred, private spaces retained, and living spaces positioned to the north. • Sustainability: Form of the home is driven by its response to passive heating, cooling and ventilation techniques. Thermal mass requires minimal support to provide heating and cooling. Solar supports the fully electric kitchen and powering for their Electric Vehicle.