Designed by Woods Bagot, the Sunday Apartments in Coventry Street, Southbank, focus on the pleasures of relaxing on a weekend. With a swimming pool, terraces and landscaped gardens, these apartments form part of a new community that has emerged off the St Kilda Road boulevard. "Premier Capital Developments [Woods Bagot's client] wanted residents to feel like it was a Sunday every day," says architect Kate Frear, Principal with Woods Bagot. "Our brief included a sense of playfulness," she adds.
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Replacing a series of disused warehouses, the Sunday Apartments feature a U-shaped building centred on an internalised courtyard. Spread over 14 levels, the 237 one and two-bedroom apartments range in size from 46 square metres for a one-bedroom apartment to 75 square metres for two bedrooms. So the objective from the outset was to make relatively modest apartments feel more generous, both internally and externally.
One of the standout features in Woods Bagot's design was the elimination of internal corridors, something we've come to expect in most high-rise developments. Rather than narrow passages leading to an endless number of front doors, Woods Bagot created a series of enclosed verandas on the edge of each of the two towers. Protected from the wind by operable metal and glass coloured louvres, these communal walkways replace generic passages. "We wanted to create a sense of community. The bridges [linking the towers] also increase circulation through the building," says Frear, who was also mindful of the importance of the surrounding landscape, designed by Jack Merlo.
Given the location of the Sunday Apartments, in a relatively built-up precinct, Woods Bagot located the leisure areas on level three, rather than at ground level. There's a 25-metre length swimming pool and spa, cabana, barbecue and relaxation areas, one with a fire pit to create a sense of the outdoors room. "We wanted to provide an oasis, even though we're on the edge of the city," says Frear. While the courtyard area, with its landscape garden, receives generous natural light, this area appears considerably lighter as a result of the exterior coloured glazing, changing in hues from yellow at level three to more intense red as one moves towards the apex of each tower. "The colours were deliberately selected to ensure the lightest colours were positioned closer to ground level to accentuate natural light," says Frear.
The internal layouts of the apartments also show another way of creating space within relatively small footprints. Each apartment, for example, includes a highly lacquered pod, in either apple green, red or white. And while these pods offer a dash of colour (except for white), they also create a sense of space in the apartments, some of which are only 4.2 metres in width (less than the size of a modest Victorian cottage). "Eliminating fixed doors allow the apartments to feel more spacious. But there are sliding doors concealed in the pods to separate rooms," says Frear.
Rather than create a disparate range of joinery, the pod features a variety of functions and cupboards appropriate to each side of the pod. The kitchen joinery includes a concealed laundry, fridge and microwave, together with a pantry. Even the air conditioning unit has been concealed on this front, allowing the full width of balconies to be used. And in the bathroom, the wall of the pod includes vanities and mirrors.
Although the Sunday Apartments was designed by Woods Bagot during the global financial crisis, according to Frear, the developers were open to exploring new ideas in apartment living. "When they saw a good idea, they were keen to move forward rather than like many others, who at that time, were cutting back," adds Frear.
