A Melbourne property developer and architecture practice director says apartments don't necessarily need to be bigger, just better designed.
"Apartments don’t need to be bigger, they need to be better designed and built to a higher quality," says Ben Keck, director of Melbourne property development company Assemble and architecture practice Fieldwork. Asked for his take on apartment design standards in NSW and those proposed in Victoria, Keck says “regulation of minimum apartment sizes is based on a false premise that bigger is better and poses a serious threat to housing supply and affordability, as has eventuated in Sydney." Instead, Keck argues in favour of policy that incentivises good design, which he believes is likely to be more effective than policy which tries to enforce it.
Last year, Keck and his business partners Giuseppe Demaio and Joachim Holland published a detailed analysis of the effectiveness of apartment design standards in Sydney. The Assemble directors don't support increasing the minimum sizes allowed for apartments in Victoria. "As long as light and air amenity to an apartment is of high quality, then a studio that is smaller than 37sqm or a one-bed that is smaller than 50sqm can be a great place to live," they wrote. They also argued that a mandatory orientation of living areas to face north was overly simplistic, as orientating living areas to the north might mean turning one’s back to a great view of the city, a park or the ocean and in Melbourne, for eight months of the year, a western orientation for living spaces is really pleasant.
Any policy the Victorian state government might introduce should, argues Keck, be used as guidelines and applied with discretion, rather than applied rigidly as some councils in NSW have done. "On balance, it appears that while the policies in NSW have improved the standard of apartment design in Sydney, they have also contributed towards a reduction in the supply of new apartments and, consequently, a decrease in affordability relative to Melbourne," the article states. They argue policy that incentivises good design could potentially be more effective than policy which tries to enforce it.
"In our view, the core issue of this debate is one of design rather than density," they wrote. "Most people are comfortable with the idea of a denser Melbourne, but they are fearful of an ugly Melbourne full of poorly designed apartment buildings. We firmly believe that the standard of apartments in Melbourne can and should be improved. A significant step in this direction would be introducing legislation, like in NSW, which requires apartment buildings to be designed by registered architects and enforces their continued involvement to ensure the design quality approved at town planning is achieved."
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