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A cottage in Carlton and a tiny cabin among the gum trees: Victoria's best homes

A cottage in Carlton and a tiny cabin among the gum trees: Victoria's best homes

The Age6 days ago
A reimagined 1870s workers cottage, a suburban house wrapped in vines and a tiny cabin perched on stilts among gum trees are the Victorian winners of Australia's most outstanding new homes in the 2025 Houses Awards.
Carlton Cottage by Lovell Burton Architecture is unprepossessing from the street but opens up into an airy space when you enter with the house's flexibility for family living leading it to win the House Alteration and Addition Under 200 Square Metres category.
Partners in their architecture firm and in life, Joseph Lovell and Stephanie Burton, have two young children and designed the home to be adaptable to the changing needs of their family as their children grow up.
They bought the 'pretty dilapidated' 1870s workers cottage on Canning Street and started removing the lean to extensions tacked on the back.
Lovell and Burton kept the footprint of the original cottage and then opened up the rear of the house to a large living and kitchen area with a mezzanine bedroom and ensuite above which can be shut off with wooden acoustic panels.
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They wanted the reworked 1870s workers' cottage to be flexible to their evolving needs by adopting a 'loose fit' design approach that does not prescribe how each room is used.
'We kind of had this term loose fit at the very start of the project,' Burton says. 'Obviously things like bathrooms and kitchens, you can't really move them, but we wanted to make everything else as inherently flexible as we could.'
Large pivot doors, and a sliding fence panel, allow family life to spill out into the garden and, beyond, to the laneway, increasing living space.
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