Architect makes large Melbourne warehouse apartment more intimate

Shelley Roberts has worked for decades on Melbourne’s CBD apartment conversion stock. With most renovation commissions being for small digs, she’s mastered every trick in cribbing space and amenity within tightly-bounded walls.

Her skill in creating crisp, chic and mainly black and white apartments has won her such a steady word-of-mouth clientele that in some buildings Roberts has done several units.

So when Gleeson Roberts Architecture were contacted by clients who’d bought into one of the city’s earliest office-to-residential buildings, The Sargood Apartments that sit behind the heritage-listed Herald and Weekly Times  on Flinders Street, they confronted a new paradigm of scale. 

At 235 square metres “it was the biggest project I’d had to date”, she says. Originally converted in 1999 and given three bedrooms and two bathrooms across three shallow floor levels, and “a just-too-big living area”, Roberts saw her job as making “a super huge, warehouse-style apartment more intimate” for the Sydney couple who use it as their base for shopping, eating and golfing visits.

Using smoke-stained oak, she rationalised the floor space, reconfigured walls, and introduced joinery, appliances and furniture of such quality that every piece, every feature of inventive detail (such as the ceiling-high upholstered master bedhead), is remarkable.

Not wanting cupboards or an extractor to sit above the seven-metre stone and porcelain kitchen bench, “which combines the functions of kitchen, dining and study”, she sourced a stove with an extractor that sucks fumes downwards.

“We didn’t set out to do high spec. We just thought carefully about how and where to spend money. We were going for elegant, not precious.”

In a sentence, that summarises the Chanel-like effect of a refit that appears so open yet fluently functional and in such “a soft palette of linen, browny-blacks, white, and touches of indigo blue … the client loves blue”.

Roberts’ signature black and white is evident; some kitchen cupboards are black inside and white outside. In the charcoal-tiled bathrooms with the double water-fall showers, cupboards have mirrors outside, mirrors inside, mirrors as splashbacks and mirrors underneath the long oak bench.

As haute-couture as this apartment is the level of excellence is exactly what the situation required, for it has one of the most bountiful Melbourne outlooks available.

In looking south through the piles that raise a new office building above and away from the 1920s H&WT building, it sees the greenery of King’s Domain, Government House, bends in the Yarra River, the Arts Centre spire and way beyond, wedges of Port Phillip Bay.

“What’s really so special about it,” says Shelley Roberts, “is that outlook”. 

Architect Shelley Roberts’ conversion in the Sargood Apartments building, in Flinders Street, Melbourne.