Design

Merri is designed to complement the natural beauty of Merri Creek. The homes aim to feel familiar and immersed in their natural surroundings. With a relaxed connection to the natural environment, each building’s materiality speaks to a timeless and integrated quality, where bushland will infiltrate the architecture over time. Each building responds to its surroundings through varied height and scale with connections through intimate shared spaces, providing the opportunity to meet neighbours or enjoy a secluded spot in the sun.

Merri Creek Under High Street Bridge, Artist Impression

Architectural vision

Each building name is drawn from the six tributaries that run into Merri Creek. The creek flows 70km from Australia’s Great Dividing Range through Melbourne’s northern suburbs to the Yarra River. Many smaller tributaries flow into the creek from upstream including Merlynston, Central, Edgars, Aitken, Malcolm and Wallan creeks. The creek borrows its name from the Wurundjeri-willam phrase Merri Merri meaning “very rocky”.

Edgars Building looking back from the Creek, Artist Impression

Landscaping

Nature nurtured

Merri makes the most of its unique location by blurring boundaries
to both the creek and nearby urban environments. The site offers
an opportunity for locals to connect with the creek along a new path created as part of the project. Open pathways from Walker Street provide vistas through the buildings and open onto sunny piazzas with eucalyptus trees, leading down towards bushland and water.

Urban design and the natural environment are brought together through the blending of architecture and setting. Each building and its surroundings establish places for residents and the public to connect. Focusing on the landscape architecture throughout, nature is encouraged to integrate with the public spaces and parts of the building.

Artist Impression

Between Merri’s buildings, the landscape adopts floral themes
which create a year-round seasonal environment. Rich, layered
and textured vegetation focuses on three distinct planting themes; yellow, red and blue. Pedestrians can move in and out of these colourful spaces, experiencing dappled light in winter, foliage in autumn, bright blooms in spring and leafy canopies in summer. An important priority for the landscaping architecture is rehabilitation of indigenous and native flora such as feather spear-grass, eucalyptus, and acacia’s along Merri Creek. This, paired with the retention and supplementing of the existing trees along Walker Street, restores the area’s natural surrounds.

“The border between public and private spaces is separated by a soft transition. This is where the landscape becomes important, increasing privacy which is managed through walls and landscape alike.”

Lucas Dean, Associate Landscape Architect, TCL Landscape Architecture

Casuarina Cunninghamiana

Chrysocephalum Semipapposum

Correa Alba

Dianella Cassa Blue

Goodenia Ovata ‘Gold Cover’

Rhagodia Candolleana

Scaevola Albida ‘Mauve Dome

Themeda Triandra

Thomasia Solanacea

Shared spaces

With six buildings cascading back from the corner of Walker and High Streets, Merri’s ground level shares four piazzas, providing distinct spaces for cosy connections, a neighbourly chat or a moment of peace. All car parking and vehicle access is located underground and out of sight, making way for peaceful, private and accessible spaces above.

This is where the community makes it their own. Where artists can showcase their work. And where the sound of the creek is always nearby, while every element, every area, has a sense of permeability.

Wallan Building Rooftop Views of Treetops and City, Artist Impression

Central Building Shared Pathway, Artist Impression

Spaces to call your own

Collaborating with landscape architects, TCL, each building has a dedicated rooftop garden.  Creek fronting buildings enjoy sweeping views of the nearby creek, tree tops and the city beyond, with comfortable spaces fitted with shade structures and a garden experience interspersed with pockets of seating and outdoor dining. The accompanying planting design will match that of the Merri Creek below, providing a private place of refuge and space where local birdlife is encouraged to visit.

Artist Impression

Adding texture to the environment

High quality and robust materials feature extensively throughout Merri. Textured concrete and masonry give gravitas and longevity to the structure, in a cohesive architectural language. From the ground floor, pedestrians can take in accents and details that provide visual interest. Steelwork, feature tiling and recycled timber help frame the buildings’ setting, while lead lighting details such as signature stained glass windows throughout the lobbies add visual accents within. A focus is placed on the use of natural materials and colours to merge with the surrounding environment, with an added commitment to target over 80% local suppliers and materials for the construction, which helps support Australian manufacturing and gives confidence that components originate from trusted sources.

Artists Impression

Makers

Salvage Centre - Workshop

Salvage Centre
  • QTell us about the business and how it started?
  • AWe specialise in recycled timber, utilizing timber from flooring to furniture. We started by saving windows and doors around Melbourne, and then it escalated to just doing timber and developing products using the old timber from beautiful old buildings. Rather than seeing timber go to landfill, we’ve generated world class products from old timber.
  • QTell us about your process?
  • AWe pull down the roof trusses and the wall studs of houses, physically pulling the houses down by hand so we can save the timber from getting damaged by excavators and taken to landfill. Then we go through the process of nailing it and repurposing it back into flooring. We spend the time and effort to pull the timber out by hand, whereas most people don’t have the time to do this. We recycle 90% of the timber we find.
  • QWhy is it so important to save the timber?
  • AThe biggest advantage is the sustainability side of using recycled timber for the environment, we’re a carbon neutral product. We are also using quality timber. A lot of the timber in houses that are demolished use old growth timber, so what we’re pulling out is around 300 years old. This timber is much more stable and durable than what is produced today. We create jobs and invest money into labor with every house that we demolish, employing an extra three to four people to help.
    There’s nobody in Australia that can do what we do, we’re the only company that’s FSC accredited, which is the international governing body for timber. Every house that we do, we actually document the timber that comes out of it. So we’ve got a database of all the timber that we’ve recovered. We can then obviously prove that we’re not selling more timber than what we’re accumulating.

Cameron Loney, Director
Featured in the Lifecycle scheme only.

Victorian Bluestone Quarries - Workshop

Victorian Bluestone Quarries
  • QTell us about the business and how it started?
  • AWe’re a family business that’s been running for over 52 years, processing Australian Bluestone and granite and predominantly supplying to civil, commercial and domestic markets. We saw a niche in the market for genuine Australian Bluestone products. I work with my sisters on the business and now we’ve got our involved, everyone’s on the same level of providing a beautiful product for our beautiful city, and beyond.
  • QWhy did you get into the business?
  • ABack in the 1960’s it was very, very hard and costly to fine quality bluestone. So my dad decided to get into it and start supplying real, genuine stone to the city of Melbourne.
  • QTell us about the products you’re installing at Merri?
  • AWe’re installing bluestone tiles into the development that’s reclaimed Bluestone from the site. We’re cutting it up, grading it and then having it as a feature tile in the apartments to show that it’s a local product. Imagine the block of stone like a loaf of bread; we cut slices using diamond blades. Once our materials are cut to size, the actual offcut itself will either get crushed into road base or sold off as a product for garden landscaping. The actual sludge from the material can get repurposed as a clean fill for the site, or a fertilizer for trees. It’s satisfying that we’re repurposing what’s been in the ground for millions of years and it’s not going to the tip. The site is lucky enough to have brilliant material to utilize in the project and give a sense of history to the owners of the new homes.
  • QWhat are the benefits of using this product over others in the market?
  • AIt’s a natural product and is fully sustainable. The offcuts get recycled into road space or features for gardens. We’re supporting the local industry, local small families and local quarries. There’s an ongoing effect on local processes of tooling, which is beneficial to all of us. It’s very important to keep our Australian stone industry alive, where we are repurposing a product that would normally go
    into landfill.

Peter Skliros, Managing Director
Featured in the Lifecycle scheme only.

Adadaz Leadlights - Workshop

Adadaz Leadlights
  • QTell us about the business and how it started?
  • AAs a second generation family business, I got into work at an early age through my father. What we do is bespoke stained glass windows; repurposing old glass with different  patterns and textures in a way that works in modern environments.
  • QCan you tell us about the project that you’re installing at Merri?
  • AUsing colour design and texture, we make different LED profiles and use glass in a way that people usually wouldn’t think of using it. The glass at Merri has elements of the river running through it. We’ve drawn full scale drawings that we then cut the glass to and put this together like a jigsaw puzzle.
    It’s entirely handcrafted.
  • QWhat makes your products so bespoke?
  • AThey’re unique, handcrafted and designed specifically for the clients needs. We repurpose
    old glass in a way that no one would think to use it in. It’s seeing the glass in a different light, as an art form. Whole glass pieces can be quite overbearing sometimes, but using tiny bits of existing glass
    really makes our pieces unique.

Adam Hall, Owner