36 EMERGING PROJECT
PACKINGTON STREET
Packington Street is a park view property in the heart of the inner Melbourne suburb of Prahran. Formerly a dilapidated workers’ cottage, it operated prior to this project as a university share house for 20 years, suffering the predictable wear and tear associated with a string of uncommitted residents. The light quality was very poor, and the property still utilised an outdoor toilet. The client did not intend to live in the house, and Kennon Studios was approached to renovate in preparation for its sale. This meant creating a home for an imaginary client, which is the inverse of studio founder and director Peter Kennon’s usual interrogative and client-centric process, where his clients make up the brief. “When you don’t know the end user, you have to plan for the user that they might be, and allow for some flexibility for them to customise it to their own ways of working and living,” says Kennon. Accordingly, he studied the demographics of the area, tried to discern the ideal inhabitants for the little three-bedroom property and designed the space accordingly. “You don’t necessarily have any client feedback – you have to make it up,” he adds. Whatever he did, he did it right, as the Packington Street project broke all of the records in Stonnington for sale price per square metre. “It shows the value of good design,” he says. “It’s proof that what we do creates value.” The conceptual brief was to make the place into a welcoming and warm home, “which was pretty hard”, Kennon laughs. The home had a Heritage overlay, and the façade was important to the streetscape. It is one of three identical houses in a row of Edwardian-style red brick properties but, as a workers’ cottage, it had no substantial Edwardian façade or period detail.
THE BUSINESS OF ARCHITECTURE
PHOTOGRAPHY © TIMOTHY KAYE
/ ISLA SUTHERLAND
