This is Ellie
At just 180 square metres, Ellie doesn’t sound like a large house – but it would be a huge apartment. Here, we rewrote the rules, and by drawing cues from apartment planning, we reimagined what a single-storey family home could be on a tight inner-city block.
Set behind a restored weatherboard façade in a heritage streetscape, Ellie is our home – designed for our young family. With 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and a second living/playroom, the house feels spacious and generous, all on one level.
The layout wraps around a central courtyard that brings northern light into every part of the home. From here, you meander up to a rooftop terrace that captures sunset views over the city skyline – a quiet moment to enjoy the sky above Collingwood.
We lived through every part of this build – including a 12-month scrap with council to restore the façade properly, giving the old cottage its first real maintenance in over 130 years. The site was re-founded on a concrete slab to stabilise Collingwood’s reactive soil.
A big part of that came down to planning. We removed corridors entirely, redirecting the entry around the side of the house to walk straight into the living area. That allowed us to absorb the original entry corridor and widen the main bedroom. We used rooms to transfer into other rooms, helping us get more out of compact spaces like the laundry and playroom. Every square metre had to work hard – and it does.
During demolition, we uncovered and salvaged hundreds of handmade bricks from the original 1900s structure. Too good to waste, these now define the interiors – forming walls and built-in joinery. Many were blackened from years inside the chimneys, and their rich patina informed the material palette throughout.
It wasn’t without effort. Many weekends were spent moving those bricks from one end of the site to the other. At the time, it was exhausting – now, we wouldn’t change a thing.
