Esplanade Brighton | Wood Marsh Architecture

Melbourne / Australia / 2025

3
3 Love 257 Visits Published

Esplanade Brighton elevates medium-density coastal housing in Melbourne through thoughtful design and contextual sensitivity. Delivered in two stages, the project balances bold contemporary architecture with a deep respect for the site’s unique Bayside location and surrounding urban fabric.


The project replaces a vacant brownfield site with a collection of 24 townhouses and 11 apartments across 4 distinct buildings, nestled amongst an extensively planted native garden.


The site is tightly constrained on three sides by apartments, post-war residences, trainlines and the Brighton Beach Hotel and car park. The masterplan seeks to maximise westward views towards Greenpoint Park, the beach and Port Phillip Bay.


Instead of filling the site, a series of sculptural pavilions have been carefully composed and positioned within a new coastal garden. More than half of the site has been landscaped to create a lush green spine between the townhouses to the rear of the site and the two distinctive apartment blocks at the front. This also aligns axially with the Green Point cenotaph memorial.


Townhouses stretch along a tree-lined shared accessway, affording opportunities for neighbourly interaction and play. Their undulating façade establishes a finer grain residential streetscape through softly fluted timber screens and overhanging terraces, which carefully control views and overlooking. This transitions seamlessly into the larger sculptural apartment blocks as the streetscape blends into the coastal garden setting. Across the masterplan, the use of enduring and long-lasting materials, such as timber, stucco rendered masonry, and zinc are employed to create warmth, texture, and durability. These materials, combined with the buildings’ carefully composed forms, allow the development to blend with the coastal context while providing a clear point of difference to each individual pavilion. From the beach, the apartment blocks follow the existing urban grain, with drops in height from north to south. This reduces their bulk, respecting the beachfront context of individual low-rise dwellings.


Within the apartments, the green spine enables apartment layouts with multiple aspects to the beach and garden spaces and for cross ventilation and passive cooling of the internal spaces. Interiors are finely crafted and meticulously detailed, with natural materials and bespoke design elements such as cast bronze door handles, joinery and bathroom fittings.


A fabric first approach means all external walls have extremely high levels of insulation, with a mix of fully insulated double stud walls and rendered masonry providing additional thermal mass to northern elevations. High performance energy efficient glazing utilising thermally broken frames allow the apartment blocks to achieve an outstanding development average of 7.8 stars (with many individual apartments scoring more than 8.5 stars). Throughout the project, an exceptional level of acoustic separation was achieved. Further, irrigation for the gardens was provided by harvested rainwater collected on site.


The development offers an exemplary response to the urban, coastal, and residential context of Melbourne, blending innovation with sensitivity to create a cohesive and vibrant community.


 


Photography: Derek Swalwell, Ben Moynihan and Lynton Crabb

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    Esplanade Brighton elevates medium-density coastal housing in Melbourne through thoughtful design and contextual sensitivity. Delivered in two stages, the project balances bold contemporary architecture with a deep respect for the site’s unique Bayside location and surrounding urban fabric. The project replaces a vacant brownfield site with a collection of 24 townhouses and 11 apartments across 4 distinct buildings, nestled amongst an extensively planted native garden. The site is...

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