Keith
Street

Mixed use / Hampton East, Victoria
Design Management, Vettex

Storeys: 3
Status: In construction

Apartments and townhouses over ground-floor commercial in Hampton East, now in construction.

Design management for the delivery team: the drawings and the consultant team coordinated through construction, and the buildability questions settled as they arrive.

The site is about 350 m² at 1 Keith Street, on a corner facing Basterfield Park and Widdop Reserve in the City of Bayside. The three-storey building has a 95 m² shop at street level, with a two-bedroom and a three-bedroom apartment and three three-bedroom townhouses above. The site sits under a Design and Development Overlay and a Special Building Overlay, and the permit allows reduced car parking, with nine car spaces and six bicycle spaces.

Chris joined with construction under way. The lower floors are concrete and the upper levels are framed in light gauge steel, so the design work centred on that change in structure: a design register to track every open item, a review of the frame model for fire separation between dwellings, acoustic separation where floors meet party walls and clashes with the steel, and the changes that followed coordinated through the consultants before framing began.

Alongside the structure, the layouts were refined for the people who will live there, with kitchens and living areas reworked in the apartments and powder rooms added to the townhouses, and the ground-floor tenancy and bin areas brought into line with council's requirements. On a building this size every junction counts, and settling those questions before the frames were made kept them on paper, where they are cheap, rather than on site.

Some changes came from what was already built: the lift shaft was resized to suit the lift supplier's shop drawings, and the ground-floor facade became double brick. Small mixed-use buildings like this one fall between two scales, too complex to run as a house and too small to carry a large consultant team. Design management fills that gap, with one set of drawings kept current and one person accountable for the questions between the trades.

Keith Street, Hampton East. Render of a townhouse kitchen opening onto its courtyard.

Keith Street, Hampton East. Render of an apartment bathroom.

Keith Street, Hampton East. Render of an apartment kitchen.

Apartment kitchen, Keith Street

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