In Melbourne's inner east, Garden Terrace by Edition Office is a home immersed in nature — elevated above a floodplain on the northern bank of the Birrarung, where the forest canopy becomes an elemental part of daily life.
Situated on a generous, leafy site along the Birrarung/Yarra River, Garden Terrace offers a calm retreat from its urban setting. "It's incredibly close to the city and more urbanised areas, so this site is really an unexpected release from that," says project lead Jonathan Brener. As the house sits on a floodplain, it needed to be elevated above the ground. The structure rises on monumental supports, creating a pronounced undercroft that the architects transformed into a key part of the home's arrival sequence.
"We've always been fascinated with the idea of thresholds," explains director Aaron Roberts. "We were interested in leaning into the shadow and allowing the landscape to populate that space." The entry moves through shadow and filtered light before ascending into the canopy — a deliberate decompression from street to dwelling. By the time you arrive at the living spaces, the city has been left behind entirely.
The landscape, designed by Eckersley Garden Architecture, works in concert with the building. "The architecture and the landscape are certainly working really hard together," Roberts notes. Rather than framing the garden as an adjunct, the house treats it as a spatial equal — terraces, openings, and overhangs calibrated to draw the green canopy into every room. The river gums outside are not backdrop but co-occupant.
"Eventually the building should be subsumed by landscape or feel like it falls away into the landscape and becomes a relic of place," Roberts says. It is an ambition that extends beyond completion — a house designed not for the moment of handover but for the slow accumulation of growth, shade, and patina that will, over years, dissolve the boundary between what was built and what was always there.
