Innovation: Easy-over house creates a stunning home

Determined to live amid Collingwood’s hipster grunge collation, a Perth couple buy a battleaxe block made up of a 2.4-metre-wide driveway (their full north-facing frontage), and the rest as a 4.8 x 14-metre rectangle. For four grungy years they live in a “shed” until the offspring arrive.

Practised builders and renovators Cath Willcock and Chris Franklyn decide to raze and rebuild and interview one conventional builder and three prefabrication companies because, like Scandinavian countries now reliant on prefabrication for 70 per cent of new housing, they see the factory-made product as the future.

When they meet architect and co-founder of ArchiBlox, Bill McCorkell, whose company annually does 40 prefabs on the east coast – with most in inner-city situations – they go with him because, as Willcock explains, “he said ‘do what you like and we’ll work it out’.”

They wanted to work a big agenda: three bedrooms, two bathrooms, two living spaces, an upper floor lobby/study space, and high end finishes such as a marble-topped kitchen bench, bluestone-tiled bathrooms and engineered oak floors.

ArchiBlox fabricated what McCorkell says was “a 70-square-metre interior design job” in the firm’s Wonthaggi factory. The result was  two truckable components finished down to the copper kitchen lights being pre-installed.

That was the easy bit of the four-month-long design and build process. Then came installation day…

On a conventional site, assemblage can take nine hours. “The final fit-out and commissioning to occupancy can take another four weeks,” McCorkell says. But there was nothing conventional about the Collingwood site: it required a massive crane to lift the two parts of the home over the eight-storey Melbourne Polytechnic building, and a heart-stopping need to shoehorn them into a space with only 50-150mm tolerances – or gaps – to neighbouring walls and fences.

Wind delayed the process, McCorkell says. But eventually “100 people watched us lift the modules over the building and they just went ‘plonk’.”

www.archiblox.com.au