Borrowed Sky Residence, Victoria Home, Modern Melbourne House, Australian Contemporary Architecture Photos
Borrowed Sky Residence in Melbourne, Victoria
10 March 2026
Architecture: Lai Cheong Brown Architects
Location: Strathmore, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Photos by Jaime Diaz-Berrio Photography
Borrowed Sky Residence, Australia
While Australia has never been more multicultural in its populace or outlook, the typical suburban Australian house has changed little in the last seventy five years to acknowledge this dramatic demographic change, with housing models still routed in the free-standing bungalow types imported from Britain and North America last century.
Borrowed Sky aimed to address this by exploring a true courtyard typology, more typical of south and east Asia, and yet to do so affordably, using common brick veneer and tiled roof material selections that ensure buildability, despite the atypical plan, and the possibility of easy adoption by a range of Australians, looking for housing types that are more culturally familiar.
Interestingly, the courtyard model presented regulatory challenges around thermal performance, as modelling systems are very much structured around centralized builds – not those that can be naturally lit from within.
Borrowed Sky is also unusual in Australian housing because it doesn’t seek to look at a carefully framed rear garden adorned by a swimming pool or our across a dynamic landscape – its introspective, looking inward to capture an outdoor moment, framed by it’s own courtyard facades, that has no direct link to the outside, beyond the sweep of sky it borrows.
How did the design team approach the challenge of introducing an atypical typology like a courtyard house into a typical suburban Melbourne setting? What considerations were made to ensure it harmonized with, or perhaps subtly challenged, the existing vernacular?
This was an interesting question, because some of the greatest practical challenges presented by the project and its site related to assumptions made when the block was first subdivided around how all future houses on the block would be arranged. Front setback requirements and rear and side easements to provide for drainage all assume houses will be large centralized masses centered on the front third of a block. Court yard housing challenges these assumptions by pulling much of what was back garden into the house’s footprint challenging these assumptions as the occupation of the block changes.
Borrowed Sky Residence in Melbourne, Victoria – Building Information
Design: Lai Cheong Brown – https://laicheongbrown.com/
Project size: 318 sqm
Site size: 654 sqm
Completion date: 2023
Building levels: 1
Builder: Smart Building Concepts
Photographer: Jaime Diaz-Berrio Photography
Borrowed Sky Residence, Melbourne, Victoria images / information received 100326
Location: Strathmore, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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