RISK REWARD
This MELBOURNE APARTMENT pays homage to NEW YORK CITY LIVING with a design that achieves a kind of METROPOLITAN INTIMACY.
This Melbourne apartment pays homage to New York City living with a design that achieves a kind of metropolitan intimacy
When you ask Greg Hargrave to give a good reason for buying off the plan in a Melbourne apartment block, the bearded investor drills down to the detail. He delivers 20 minutes of historical “context” by way of imparting the calculation of his risk. “Well, you did ask,” he jokes. “Unlike most of the people in this building, I’ve lived in the city; I know its machinations and mindset… This is my third apartment along Spring Street.” Long story short, Hargrave has inhabited Melbourne’s CBD for more than two decades (with some inner-suburban dalliances thrown in) and has successfully intuited all its waves of culture and commerce while producing startling new homes of its old structures. He asserts that the city’s prime residential addresses number along Spring Street — the easternmost edge of the Hoddle Grid (the city centre) that gives home to the Victorian State Government and greens off into a spectacular stretch of public parklands.
“I dreamed of doing my take on Central Park living,” he says with a gaze over Treasury Gardens from the 19th-floor vantage of his new home at 35 Spring Street — the Bates Smart-designed tower that won the Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ 2018 Frederick Romberg Award for Residential Architecture — Multiple Housing. “Big height, big terrace, big views of landmarks like the MCG.” Surveying the city’s sporting colosseum, Hargrave heads to the apartment’s north side and motions to his former homes. They lodge in shades-of-grey towers gleaned through floor-to-ceiling window frames finessed by Bates Smart into a ‘warp and weft’ façade that nods to the former rag trade of adjacent Flinders Lane.
He sums up his experience within the neighbouring copper-clad block designed by Greek-Australian architect Nonda Katsalidis as “great, but a bit gun barrel and dark down the back”, and his makeover of the penthouse perched on top of 99 Spring Street as “very mad, Memphis and fucked-up”.
The latter scheme, executed by Kerry Phelan Design Office (KPDO), dramatically pre-empted wider design’s rediscovery of postmodernism by at least five years. It was smack-in-the-face bold, but maybe not such an easy resell? “Who cares?” says Hargrave, decrying the disappointing sameness in contemporary design. “Yes, the overall visual standard is lifting, but you can walk into a Nordic restaurant in Singapore or a New York bar in Sweden and wonder where the hell originality has gone to hide.” ››
‹‹ Noting that he was single when living at No 99, Hargrave admits that he can somehow zero in on the impending zeitgeist but is prone to boredom. “I mean, while they were working on that apartment, the guys from Colliers [real estate] told me I had to look at this.” He recalls his first visit to the display suite, where a scale model of the 44-floor Bates Smart tower showed permit-compliant setbacks on level 19 and the penthouse peak. These recessions in the building profile created atypically large outdoor spaces — a bonus that the 19th floor further rewarded with nearly four-metre ceiling heights (thanks to the corner siting of a service core).
This built allusion to the Big Apple had Hargrave at “huge terrace and high ceilings”, so he bought the entire 19th level, negotiating the cost down to compensate for the fit-out of the five apartments intended for its floor plate. He then commissioned KPDO to create a ‘house’ within the Bates Smart construct and briefed landscape designer Myles Baldwin to build a Roman-style rooftop garden. During the four-year design and construct, Hargrave met and married Storm, a striking brunette whose name belies her nature and the serene effect she has had on Hargrave’s expletive-edged decorative world — polished plaster walls, leathered stone and rough-sawn oak boards being more recuperative than revolutionary. The biggest issue for KPDO, aside from redesigning around changing circumstance, was the balance of diametrically opposed requirements for both intimacy and a city outlook in a glass box scaled to contain five residences — a challenge further exacerbated by the arrival of baby Goldie.
Planning the L-shape apartment with deference to the downbelow city — a rational layout with connecting laneways provoking surprise encounters — architect Stephen Javens and interior designer Kerry Phelan (coprincipals of KPDO) contrived a series of sliding wall sections and a palace-worthy enfilade of doors. These openings control the wraparound reward of Melbourne from every compass point in a compound that sequences main wing, formal living and family wing.
Long, low slabs of neutral sofa seating and a generous 12-seat stretch of dining table discreetly fill formal rooms, deferring all colour and contrast to interior art (persistently at the anti-modernist end) and outer Treasury Gardens.
“Greg wanted more of a family home,” says Javens. “But this place still had to facilitate his legendary parties. It’s a little-known secret, but we will share it with the world: Greg is a great dancer.”