Garden Terrace | Edition Office | 2026 | 澳大利亚
In Melbourne’s inner east, Garden Terrace by Edition Office is a home immersed in nature, where the forest canopy is an essential and elemental part of daily life.Situated on a generous, leafy site on the northern bank of the Birrarung/Yarra River, Garden Terrace offers a calm retreat from its urban setting. “It’s incredibly close to the city and more urbanised areas, so this site is really an unexpected release from that,” says Jonathan Brener, project lead and architect at Edition Office.
The brief was to create a home for a family of four – along with one dog and a cat – that would intimately connect their daily life to the surrounding landscape. Despite the site’s size and riverside location, nearby developments meant that privacy was limited. This prompted the architects to design a more inward-looking home that placed nature at the centre of the experience. “We were really interested in how we could bring that landscape right up into the building and allow for that strong connection,” says director Aaron Roberts.With this aim in mind, the architects found a surprising synergy with the work of Melbourne painter Grant Nimmo, whose paintings depict the dense, layered rainforests of the Dandenong Ranges. Nimmo’s otherworldly canvases capture the sensation of moving through a forest and their serene, immersive atmosphere came to quietly define this project.
One of the site’s defining constraints also shaped the design; as the house sits on a floodplain, it needed to be elevated above the ground. As a result, the structure rises on monumental structural supports, creating a pronounced undercroft. Rather than treating this area as an unused space, the architects transformed it into a key part of the home’s arrival sequence. “We’ve always been fascinated with the idea of thresholds,” says Roberts. “Often undercrofts in buildings are really dark spaces and not very enjoyable, but we were interested in leaning into the shadow and allowing the landscape to populate that space.”Here, a winding pathway moves through layered plantings, drawing visitors gradually inward. The large structural “feet” of the building frame shifting views of plants and sky as the path curves around. Taller trees pass through the upper level via carefully shaped voids, while others settle into the quiet, shadowed garden below. The result is a transportive and mysterious approach that enriches the experience of returning home. “There is a slowing down and reconnection with place and with home,” he says. “It’s a really rich visual and spatial experience.”
The house itself takes on a restrained and simple form. A rectilinear perimeter clad in slender timber battens defines the building’s outer edge. Depending on the angle of light and viewpoint, the facade can appear either solid and monolithic or almost translucent, dissolving into the surrounding trees.Inside, the plan is contained and intimate, with zones that allow for both separation and togetherness. The home reads as two wings – one for shared living and the other for bedrooms – yet the division is intentionally subtle, with a central curved wall of glazing allowing for visual connection between the two. “As soon as you cross over from one side to the other, you’re immediately connected with the entirety of the other wing,” says Brener. Throughout the interior, carefully positioned openings frame lush pockets of vegetation, allowing for the canopy to remain a constant presence in everyday life.
A natural and minimal material palette reinforces this sense of continuity between inside and out. The exterior is clad entirely in blackened timber, a finish that continues through sections of the interior. “Part of what helps this project feel like it’s really connected to those garden spaces and those voids with the trees is that the external material travels inside,” explains Roberts. At the same time, timber joinery and internal walls shift toward warmer tones, creating internal spaces that feel tranquil and welcoming.Achieving such a close relationship between architecture and garden meant that landscape design was a core part of the project. For this, the team relied on a close collaboration with long-time partners Eckersley Garden Architecture. “The landscaping is an exceptional and undeniable component of the project,” says Brener. “It’s an integral part of the experience of the house – from the approach to daily rituals.”
The garden combines native and exotic plant species, creating a canopy that shifts in colour and texture throughout the year. “The trees are seasonal, so you’re reading time over the year in those spaces,” says Roberts. Even the darker elements of the interior help emphasise this relationship. The blackened timber ceilings – which on paper may sound heavy or compressive – actually draw the colour and movement of the foliage deep into the rooms. “It amplifies, in a really physical way, the changing canopies of the trees literally colouring the spaces.”Despite Garden Terrace’s strong architectural form, the architects’ ambition is for the building to gradually recede into its environment. “I think it’s really important that the building doesn’t work without the landscape,” he says. “The architecture and the landscape are certainly working really hard together.” Over time, he hopes the balance will shift even further toward the natural setting. “Eventually the building should be subsumed by landscape or feel like it falls away into the landscape and becomes a relic of place.”For now, Garden Terrace sits delicately between those two conditions: a defined architectural object that slowly becomes part of the forest-like garden that surrounds it.
Architecture by Edition Office
Build by Comb Construction
Interior Design by Edition Office
Landscape Design by Eckersley Garden Architecture
Artwork Supplied by Daine Singer
- 转载自：The Local Project
- 图片@The Local Project
- 语言：英语
- 编辑：序赞网
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