Union Street_Description — Trower Falvo Architects

Union Street

Melbourne, Victoria
2026

Project Team
Dayne Trower, Simona Falvo

Photography
Ben Hosking

The suburban fence is one of Australia’s most ubiquitous architectural artefacts. It is at once ordinary and highly codified; prescribed in height, repetitive in rhythm, and understood primarily as an instrument of separation.

At Union Street, a residential alterations and additions project to a Victorian terrace on a narrow corner site, this element becomes the project’s central architectural question. Rather than accepting the fence as a boundary between dwelling and suburb, or an object of division, the project asks whether it might instead operate as a connective structure and one capable of mediating between house, street and landscape to act instead as a civic gesture.

Typically defined by regulation and repeated across countless streetscapes, a fence marks ownership through a familiar rhythm of either brick, timber, steel or masonry. At Union Street, this inherited condition is neither concealed nor celebrated. Instead, it is expanded. The boundary is thickened, occupied and transformed into an architectural field that mediates between dwelling and suburb through the gesture of a cedar batten fence. With this shift, the project seeks to dissolve the certainty of where house ends and street begins.

In concept, the peculiarities of the site further highlighted this inquiry. Constrained to a 3.5 metre wide allotment extending forty metres in length, the corner condition demanded a continual negotiation between exposure and enclosure. A fence, in one form or another, was unavoidable. The design response was therefore not to conceal or minimise this condition, but to elevate it into a generative architectural system.

Through a sequence of repeated bays, the fence is transformed from a peripheral object into the primary ordering device of the project, reconstructing the corner block and establishing a new relationship between the existing Victorian dwelling, the contemporary addition and the surrounding suburban fabric.

Developed from the simple geometry of an equal angle section, this framework establishes both order and identity. What begins as fence becomes screen, enclosure and structure. Rooms, circulation and courtyard spaces are defined by this rhythm, while the equal angle vertical extension forms shading devices and supports a secondary roof plane above. The boundary is no longer read as a singular element but as a layered and inhabitable system, one that structures occupation across the site.

Environmental performance is inherently embedded within this framework. Elevated planter boxes suspended between a double roof create a roof garden, temper heat gain and introduce vegetation into the architectural section, while harvested rainwater is collected and recirculated for irrigation.

A courtyard divides the residence from the studio at the rear, establishing a sequence of open and enclosed spaces across the length of the site.

An internal material palette of solid Spotted Gum timber, plywood lining and bluestone thresholds defines the arrangement of spaces between terrace, addition, courtyard and studio. Spotted Gum timber windows, doors and ventilation panels accent the courtyard-facing elevations and allow further opportunities to mediate the internal thermal environment.

At Union Street, architecture emerges not through the invention of a new object, but through the close examination of an existing suburban condition. By treating the fence as both subject and structure, the project challenges its conventional role as an instrument of division and recreates it to propose a more reciprocal relationship between architecture and its context, where dwelling and suburb are not opposing conditions but participants in the same agenda.