Australian firm Open Studio have completed a small artists' studio shared between two properties in Flemington, Australia.

Called Artist Studio, the building contains a studio, store room, garden shed and a garage.

It is located between two residences whose occupants removed their boundary fence to create a larger, shared garden.

The studio is clad in corrugated steel and rests on a concrete base.

The distorted square plan defines three distinct exterior spaces: a playground, a vegetable garden and an outdoor sitting area.

Here's some text from the architects:

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This small project is located at the rear of two houses in Flemington - a suburb  of Melbourne. The two properties' owners decided some time ago to remove the boundary fence to create a shared back garden.The resulting garden is unusually wide and surprisingly large - space enough for a range of activities.

The main question for this project was how to place the new building to the open quality of the site while defining three landscape areas in the garden(playground, vegetable garden, outdoor sitting) A pragmatic rectangular shape was deformed to follow the site specific conditions. The angular geometry hep to define the landscape zones.

The project's brief was a combination of four different functions: a painting studio, a large store room, a garden shed and a garage. These four functions require to be independently used and need strong "internal" quality. Like four inner rooms protected from the outside these spaces are somehow hidden and disengaged for the exterior, their functions become indistinguishable format the outside.

The result is a strong distinction between interior and exterior. The interior is a white neutral space with various gradations of natural light.

In contrast, the exterior acquires an object-like artificial quality. Its material expression is abstracted by the careful location of he openings, the reduction of materials and concealment of construction requirements. Contact with the ground is accentuated by exposing the edge of the concrete slab.