TANDEM Design Studio Builds a 49-Unit Co-operative Village for Women on a Former Quarry in Melbourne

Social housing projects rarely get to claim the word "village" without some degree of marketing fantasy. Summerhill Village, designed by TANDEM design studio in Footscray, about 7 kilometres from Melbourne's CBD, earns it. Built on the footprint of a former bluestone quarry that had been occupied since 1961 by deteriorating concrete block retirement units erected by the Lions Club, the project gathers 49 apartments around a central courtyard for a co-operative of women over 55. It accommodates roughly 70 residents on a site that, under conventional suburban subdivision, would house 15 to 20 people.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is not just the density arithmetic but the way it negotiates an awkward social contract: how do you insert medium-density housing into a low-rise suburban street without triggering the reflexive hostility that such proposals usually provoke? TANDEM's answer is a building that reads as two storeys from the street, steps up to three at the rear, and deploys pitched roofs, arched openings, and domestic-scaled frontages drawn from European precedents. The result is a piece of social infrastructure that looks like a neighbourhood, not an institution.

A Street Face That Doesn't Shout

The street elevation is the project's most deliberate piece of diplomacy. White corrugated cladding and recessed balconies break the mass into a series of repeating volumes, each roughly the width of a conventional house. Young deciduous trees soften the frontage now and will screen it substantially in a few seasons. There is nothing about this elevation that signals "social housing" in the pejorative sense that phrase sometimes carries in Australian suburban politics.

Restraining the street presence to two storeys is a calculated move. The additional level is pushed to the rear, invisible from the footpath. It is a strategy that respects the existing suburban grain while quietly tripling the site's residential capacity, a trick that more housing authorities should study.

The Threshold and the Arcade

A central passageway punches through the street block and leads to the courtyard beyond. Flanked by a brick base and ribbed upper cladding, it acts as a compressed threshold: public street on one side, communal garden on the other. The arched openings that appear along the row of attached dwellings give the ground level a sense of porosity, somewhere between a loggia and a shopfront arcade, that encourages lingering rather than simply passing through.

At dusk, these arched bays glow softly from within. The effect is welcoming without being ostentatious, reinforcing the idea that this is a community that faces outward rather than retreating behind blank walls and security gates.

The Courtyard as Social Engine

The central courtyard is the project's heart and its strongest spatial idea. An oval lawn sits at the base of a three-storey well of balconies, access galleries, and external staircases. Every apartment has eyes on this space, which transforms it from a leftover void into a place of mutual visibility and casual encounter. For a co-operative housing model, that kind of passive surveillance is not a secondary benefit; it is the design's social mechanism.

The deep site, roughly five conventional lots combined, makes this courtyard possible. TANDEM have exploited the depth intelligently: apartments are arranged with dual and in some cases triple aspect, so residents get daylight from both the street and the courtyard. Cross-ventilation comes free with that arrangement, reducing reliance on mechanical cooling in Melbourne's increasingly hot summers.

Facade Depth and Materiality

The white brick facades facing the courtyard and the street carry deep-set balconies that do real environmental work. These recesses shade the glazing behind them in summer while allowing low-angle winter sun to penetrate the apartments. The depth also gives each unit a genuinely usable outdoor room rather than a token Juliet balcony.

The material palette, white brick at the base, powder-coated aluminium windows, ribbed cladding above, is modest but carefully controlled. Nothing here is expensive, yet the proportional discipline and the consistency of the detailing give the complex a coherence that many market-rate developments fail to achieve.

Inside the Units

The interiors are compact and considered. A kitchen with green and white cabinetry, an island bench, and a balcony door with translucent glazing shows how a modest one-bedroom or two-bedroom unit can feel generous without being large. The colour choice is specific enough to give the space personality without dating quickly. Concrete floor slabs with steel trusses and beams provide the structural backbone, while a proprietary fibre cement permanent formwork system for the internal walls keeps construction efficient and the floor plates thin.

What matters most about these interiors is the light. Dual and triple aspect apartments mean that even the smaller units receive daylight from more than one direction, which transforms the experience of living in a medium-density building from tolerable to genuinely pleasant.

Rooftop Infrastructure and Community Gardens

The aerial views reveal two things the street perspective conceals. First, photovoltaic arrays cover a significant portion of the flat rooftops, contributing to the energy performance of the complex. Second, shared courtyard gardens nestle into the spaces between buildings, adding productive green space to what could have been dead zones. Delivered under Victoria's Big Housing Build program, the project needed to meet rigorous sustainability benchmarks, and these rooftop systems are part of that compliance.

The aerial also confirms the intelligence of the site strategy. Surrounded by the typical low-density fabric of Melbourne's inner west, the complex achieves its density through courtyard planning rather than tower building. It sits comfortably among its neighbours while housing four times as many people.

Why This Project Matters

Summerhill Village matters because it demonstrates that social housing can be both dense and domestic without resorting to the grim efficiencies that have given the typology its bad reputation. TANDEM design studio have managed the rare feat of designing a building that serves an underhoused population, women over 55 in this case, while also making a genuine architectural contribution to its street. The stepped massing, the courtyard, the deep balconies, and the co-operative governance model all work together as a coherent proposition rather than a set of disconnected gestures.

In a country where the housing crisis conversation too often stalls at the question of whether density belongs in suburban streets, this project provides a calm, well-built answer: yes, it does, if you design it properly. The former quarry site that held 22 people in crumbling concrete now holds 70 in a courtyard village with solar panels, community gardens, and apartments that catch the sun from two sides. That is not just good architecture; it is a working model for what Australian housing policy should look like at scale.

Summerhill Village, designed by TANDEM design studio, Footscray, Victoria, Australia. 49 apartments. Completed 2025. Photography by Tom Ross.

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