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Swop South Melbourne
Swop South Melbourne takes the secondhand store — a typology built on volume and turnover — and slows it down. The largest outpost yet for the national resale chain, it occupies a 1938 warehouse on Clarke Street that had passed through a long sequence of uses: one of Australia's first Coca-Cola factories early on, and more recently an axe-throwing venue and a Crossfit gym. None of those left a usable retail plan behind, and that absence became the opening. With no conventional shopfront logic to inherit, William McRoberts and Joseph Gardner of Studio Gardner could treat the building as a found volume and ask what resale looks like when it is given room to be approached slowly. The shell does most of the arguing. Nine-metre ceilings and steel-framed windows on every side give the 500-square-metre floor its character, and decades of alteration had left the structure confused rather than legible. The design resets it rather than re-narrating it, treating the height and the raking daylight as the project's primary material. Into that volume comes a single decisive element: a perforated aluminium mesh wall dividing front of house from back. It is a restrained move that does a great deal — light passes through the fine surface, throwing shifting shadows across the floor and catching reflections of the original steel windows, so a static partition reads as something closer to weather. Fixings are concealed within the mesh and services threaded through without breaking the openness, so the intervention never competes with the room it sits inside. That restraint sets up the plan. With the mesh wall doing the dividing, the floor is left largely open, the long warehouse section legible end to end, and the clothing given the space to be read as display rather than stock. The brief, as the client framed it, was for the store to feel less like a shop than a gallery — a Parisian or New York gallery, elevated but still accessible — somewhere a visitor lingers rather than transacts. The loose, unpartitioned arrangement is what makes that pace possible, and it scales: a larger floor lets the curation breathe where the chain's earlier rooms could feel crowded at the weekend. Gardner softens the industrial frame through curation rather than construction. Vintage and contemporary pieces, drawn from local and international designers, are arranged into zones that sit between a design gallery and a room you might settle into — a vintage inflatable sofa by Günter Sulz alongside a custom steel coffee table by Sydney's Galerie Terminus, the brutalist Stos lamp by Melbourne's Brud Studia, and a four-metre tree set in an Australian-made planter. The fit-out leans on local makers for its working pieces, with the clothing racks built by Brunswick East's Weston Fab and joinery by Cessa Furniture. The effect dissolves the usual line between display and use: furniture is both exhibit and invitation, and the secondhand clothing inherits some of that same considered attention. What the project finally proposes is that resale need not be transactional in its spaces any more than in its ethics. By resetting a heavily altered warehouse, holding its volume open and ordering it with a single luminous screen, Swop South Melbourne gives ordinary pre-loved clothing an unusual measure of reverence — and argues that the slower, more deliberate way of looking usually reserved for objects behind glass can be extended to a rack of used coats.
Apartment no.201
Anastasiou Misseri reworks an enclosed three-bedroom apartment into a luminous two-bedroom residence, where built-in architecture and a restrained material palette carry a single, continuous narrative. Inside an early-2000s apartment block, Anastasiou Misseri took on a dark, enclosed three-bedroom apartment whose common areas had been left fragmented. The renovation focused on reorganising those areas into a cohesive living environment, improving both visual and functional flow. Conceived in close collaboration with the clients as a curated pied-à-terre, the project trades a third bedroom for spatial clarity and refined detailing. The decisive move is architectural rather than cosmetic. By relocating the kitchen, the designers were able to introduce a continuous built-in element that begins as kitchen cabinetry and resolves, without interruption, into a display shelving system in the living space. It is a single gesture that ties cooking, gathering, and the showing of objects into one legible run — fitting for a home shaped around the appreciation of art. Beside it, a raised carpeted platform lifts a reading nook slightly out of the flow of the room, defining an intimate corner without the need for walls. Removing one bedroom did more than open up the plan. It freed the space for a generous walk-in wardrobe folded into the master bedroom, allowing the private rooms to share the same uninterrupted spatial logic as the living areas. Throughout, custom joinery in wood veneer and coloured lacquer sets the interior temperature, warm and precise in equal measure. Bespoke pieces — the kitchen table, the TV unit, the dresser — are treated not as furniture placed within the architecture but as extensions of it, drawn from the same language. Holding the composition together is a disciplined use of marble. It appears as a continuous skirting that wraps around each room, as the kitchen worktop, and again in the bathrooms as sinks and as the lining of walls and floors. Recurring with deliberate consistency, the stone becomes a connective thread, carrying the eye from one space to the next. Every element has been considered and designed to serve a coherent whole — a residence where spatial clarity, refined detailing, and a carefully chosen palette read as a single, unbroken narrative.