A Subtle Textural Insertion – Adela Apartments by Jost Architects and Hecker Guthrie

With generous proportions, the homes that comprise Adela Apartments combine subtleties and calm to match their location. Jost Architects and Hecker Guthrie propose a series of considered homes that bring modern sensibilities together with crafted and thoughtful tactile details.

Calmly muted, Adela Apartments responds to both its setting in Elwood and emerges in response to the established environs it finds itself surrounded by. As an offering of increased density within a predominantly single-residential area, the resulting homes combine a sense of discretion and muted-ness, brought together through a clean and contemporary lens. Occupying similar proportions as a small house, each apartment captures a familiar scale and volume, separating them from the traditional apartment offering, with matched generous outdoor terrace spaces to allow an extended sense of space and openness. Close to both the Elwood foreshore and Port Phillip Bay, a casual tonality is utilised throughout, making references to the proximity of the coast, while still being within a familiar urban context. Jost Architects together with Hecker Guthrie emphasise texture and materiality in proposing an appropriately responsive formal mass within the established residential context.

Occupying similar proportions as a small house, each apartment captures a familiar scale and volume, separating them from the traditional apartment offering, with matched generous outdoor terrace spaces to allow an extended sense of space and openness.

Built by Visioneer Builders and with landscaping by Jim Fogarty Design, Adela Apartments is a responsive and a responsible development. Both in its engagement with its site and also in its embrace of sustainable principles to ensure integrated systems that support a lower dependency on external energy and ensure climatic comfort all year, Adela Apartments achieves an 8-star NatHERs Energy Rating. Both present- and future-focused, the formal vernacular approach establishes the homes as durable and timeless through a simplicity and use of clean lines. Materials of muted and warming timber with textured glass, stone and exposed concrete all ensure the spaces have a wider demographic appeal and an emphasis on quality and detail over a trend-driven methodology.

Articulating its corner site, each level is expressed through a banded approach. Deeply set terraces offer a reclusive feel from within, while creating a private reductive space. Carefully curated landscaped beds are dotted throughout the development that both add movement and steer circulation through the stepped addition of hierarchies of form. Internally, emphasis is placed on a shared openness and connection expressed in the living areas as the main focus while still allowing for flexibility with the planning, ensuring the connected living areas could be utilised in any number of ways.

Both present- and future-focused, the formal vernacular approach establishes the homes as both durable and timeless through a simplicity and clean lines.

As a series of time enduring homes, Adela Apartments are founded on the conjuring of calm and offering a place of respite for its residents for many years to come. Jost Architects and Hecker Guthrie have successfully responded to context, striking the right balance between open and closed, light and warmth.