Cart 
When architect Nic Morgante was engaged to renovate this Parkville home in the Park Avenue Towers building, the apartment was a series of plain white rooms.
‘While the building isn’t heavily documented, its late-modernist character is immediately apparent in the expressed horizontal concrete facade,’ Nic says.
‘This structural banding wraps up and acts as the windowsill height internally, right around the apartment.’
But inside, the three-bedroom home was clad in white plasterboard and laminate, dotted with tired gold-coloured knobs and tapware. All the decades-old surfaces and fixtures needed a refresh, and despite the apartment’s enviable parkland views, the kitchen was closed off from the rest of the floor plan.
The brief from the clients asked Nic to reimagine the 150-square-metre residence into an ideal city pad, envisioning a space centred around the kitchen, where they could accommodate all the best parts of inner-city family living.
‘Cooking and entertaining are a big part of their life, so providing working surfaces and connections through to the living [area] were a priority, whilst also harnessing the existing outlook to surrounding parklands,’ Nic adds.
The renovation was limited by the structural columns and existing plumbing, which became ‘immovable anchors’ for the new interiors. As a result, the transformation came down to a string of small and impactful updates.
Shifting the kitchen east made room for a new pantry and linen cupboard; walls were removed; and a large, leathered granite island bench became the new centre point of the open-plan living spaces.
‘I wanted the renovation to acknowledge [the building’s] era without replicating it literally, so the interior detailing therefore avoids unnecessary ornament,’ Nic says. ‘The palette was selected to be a soft but robust backdrop to daily life, with pale colours that wouldn’t compete too much with the distant green of surrounding tree canopies.’
Custom stainless steel elements are paired with gloss tiles that help bounce natural light throughout, as crown-cut oak joinery offers a sense of warmth — a subtle counterpoint to the building’s rigid external shell.
‘The corner dining banquet is a quietly recessed spot, but one that still reaches out to the landscape through generous views to the east and north,’ Nic adds.
Now, the apartment offers new outlooks carved between the existing columns to create a ‘more layered experience’ of the building’s location, nestled between two of Melbourne’s best parklands.
There’s an understated elegance in the renovated home, and better yet, it was achieved without a single major structural change.
