Apartment Choice

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...

When the Japanese client of Adrian Wu and Stephanie Wong , partners at SW Design, purchased his 1, 305 sq ft apartment , it was the last one available in the Mid-Levels complex. Situated on one of the tower’s highest floors, the three-bedroom, two- bathroom home offered exceptional views of Victoria Harbour and the cityscape beyond, as well as ticking other boxes such as location and space. However, it was also the deve­loper’s show flat, so he had to buy the prop­erty along with all of its contents. He could simply have moved in with his belongings, but he felt the interior was too decorative for his tastes. So he enlisted the help of the husband-and-wife architec­tural team, who had worked on a project for a friend of his. “Our brief was straightforward: our client wanted to make strategic changes so the apartment would fit his sense of aesthetics and functional needs,” says Wu. “He likes a very clean, minimal look without clutter, so most of the show-flat shelving, fabric panelling...