Tip Top

Our design for the three-acre block off Lygon Street, with its 65-year history as a commercial bakery, will transform the site into a thriving development comprising 392 residential apartments, townhouses, commercial offices and childcare facility.

A 1940s Dutch art deco heritage façade, with its strong vertical and horizontal polychrome brick work, forms the starting point for the landmark project, comprising six distinct blocks, strategically located and designed to allow greater public accessibility.

The project will be extensively landscaped, integrating public areas with spaces accessible by private residents only and will include bike racks for more than 250 bikes.

The two buildings that embrace existing facades along Edward and Weston streets have been designed to respond to original Dutch art deco styling. The studio sensitively added to the composition while retaining significant parts of the Heritage building.

Abstract notations of the bakery production process contribute to the personalities of each building, leading to the formation of more organic, curvaceous, interconnected forms. For example, the concept for the sixth building, Granary is derived from the interlocking nature of wheat, with balconies and privacy screens merging to become an integral composition.

The former stable block on Weston Street is the second historic building to be integrated within the development. Currently, the stable block is lost within the wider context of later building associated with the Tip Top factory. This proposal exposes the hidden side of the stable block in its entirety and reuses it as the entry to East Lane and the entrance to the building.

Situated behind and above the historic façade will be a series of metal framed boxes, each with subtly differing internal lining leading to movement within the façade when viewed obliquely along Weston Street. Four, elongated boxes to the west of the historical building will sit upon the more substantial structure of the ground floor commercial unit.

The ground and first floor dwellings in this building will be home offices. Each will have a shared ground floor and can be accessed through the stabled structure while also benefiting from a residential entry via the first floor podium.

All units on the second, third and fourth floors will be duplex units accessed from a single corridor on the third floor. This arrangement gives each unit access to northern light and ventilation.

Other buildings in the project also draw on abstract notions of the baking process and are appropriately titled Husk, Bakery, Wheat and Silo. A Child Care Centre called Seeds, for 60-70 children is planned for the top level of the Granary building and will include a sweeping, structural roof structure and classrooms accompanied by outdoor play areas.

The east laneway will be open to public use but will have a heightened sense of privacy, partially generated by the more organic special forms; narrowed entry points, a portal through the historic facades and the changing landscape surfaces. Car parking and planting will follow more organic forms and will not represent a conventional streetscape. From this laneway there will be a stair up to the podium level.