Brisbane's narrowest block? Building a house with only a three-metre street frontage

On a piece of land no wider than the length of a sedan, Axcis Build is chalking up one of its most challenging builds yet.

If this block of land looks ridiculously small, that’s because it is. At only three metres wide, it’s the smallest frontage that the Brisbane construction firm has ever worked with — and while Spring Hill may be known for its small lot housing, this property gives new meaning to the concept of small lot housing.

The house, a three-bedroom home currently under construction, is technically a granny flat or a duplex because the land itself is too small to be separated from the rest of the block in a subdivision.

However, the owners designed the new structure in such a way that it’s totally self-contained and can be separately rented and rated by council in the future.

Axcis Build director Michael Holzheimer said it was his smallest build footprint yet, which threw up a whole range of challenges.

“Yeah, the planning was really challenging,” he said. “Being a small block with very little parking you have to get all the scheduling right…You can’t have like 24 people rocking up at the same time.”

But that was just the beginning of the challenges. The back of the block is twice as large as the front and the architects were sure to make use of all the space they could.

“Nothing is square in the building, nothing really forms a right angle,” Mr Holzheimer said. “The roof was challenging, you had to throw trigonometry out the window.

“The roof wasn’t parallel to the walls, so each rafter had to get done separately, one at a time.”

The narrow home has attracted the attention of the neighbours, who Mr Holzheimer said were all curious about the build.

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“Most people are surprised to see what looks like a new home going up in Spring Hill,” he said. “People like to see houses going up other than townhouses and units.”

While converting an old home into a duplex on such a small block was a new trick for Axcis Build, Mr Holzheimer said it was a part of a growing taste for dual-living in Brisbane.  

“I know the whole granny flat idea’s pretty big at the moment,” he said. “I think any type of dual living is important to people.”