Winner: Urban house of the year 2022. Studio Bright has designed 8 Yard House in Melbourne, Australia.

This project, on a double-fronted site in inner suburban Melbourne, is an existing dilapidated brick veneer that interrupted the procession of terrace house facades. Meanwhile, the new 8 Yard House insertion is seen as a street-healing gesture, but true to its own time and purpose.

This new house for a large family reflects our ongoing desire to prioritise outdoor spaces as much as indoor ones. Rather than have one singular backyard and the bulk of the house as one mass, the planning and spaces are distributed along the length of the site, punctuated with a series of variously sized outdoor courtyards.

By applying the streetscape rhythm to parts of its proportions and fenestration, the street facade seeks to both empathise with context and yet address the disruptive site width. Accommodating a bedroom-garden-courtyard in direct proximity to the street, the brick surface softens and dissolves from a referenced formal composition to a more ambiguous receding curved hit-and-miss screen element, while still holding onto material continuity.

Judges comments: "8 Yard House is a beautiful and striking home, but what particularly stood out for the judges is the way that it sits in its existing context in Melbourne. In a thoughtful and playful way, it creates a new vernacular that speaks to its surroundings while providing a new narrative for the family living in it."

Architect: Studio Bright

Project: 8 Yard House