NORTH MELBOURNE HOUSE BY NMBW ARCHITECTURE STUDIO

This clever infill house in the tightly packed backstreets of North Melbourne offers valuable lessons for how we might rethink the single house as a flexible system that can adapt, beyond our immediate needs, to a range of life stages and occupants. Curiously, the house – which enjoys a neighbourly relationship with a Victorian worker’s cottage on the adjacent block – is the result of an act of protest. When the owners of the cottage found that the empty block next door was slated for a “transplanted McMansion,” they went to the council to object. At the point of seeming defeat