Willagee Housing

Willagee Housing at 15 Cummins Street is a twenty apartment development for the Department of Communities, meeting the need for middle ring social and affordable housing. Built as a design construction project with Jaxon, Willagee Housing is a study of affordable housing. Affordability has been achieved with tight planning, careful engineering to minimise structure, and stripped back finishes, including unpainted concrete soffits, unpainted galvanised metal work and bagged fast wall block. Innovative fire engineering omitted pumps and tanks.

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A Community benefit is derived by providing simple, modestly designed accommodation, while the public domain has been acknowledged with passive surveillance from the street-based apartments.

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Willagee Housing sits in a street of predominantly single residential suburbia, and while the development is only two storey, it has deliberately been designed at a different scale to its neighbour, declaring itself a modern-architecturally considered apartment building. In particular, its main architectural move, a singularly long roof that falls in unison with the fall of the street does declare the building inherently different from its neighbours. Willagee Housing's contribution to the street scape comes from a series of ground floor courtyards and upper floor balconies that seem to reach out and invite street activation.

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Central along the street frontage - the building has been teased apart to provide a landscaped access way that in turn leads into a central landscaped and treed linear courtyard that from which apartment are access. A central opening in the in the street frontage leads into a landscaped entry way that in turn leads to the central courtyard.

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The street facing ground floor units have private courtyards and front gates, engendering a street interaction. Above these, a simple of range of timber slatted screens and perforated metal sunscreens compliment the other simple and modern architecture.

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​Builder: Jaxon

Photographer: Acorn Photography