The Ireland Street Collective: West Melbourne 8 townhouse syndicate launches
In August 2015 our fourth property syndicate formed and on Christmas eve we received an early present in the form 11-17 Ireland Street West Melbourne.
Measuring 409m2 the site is a north facing warehouse with laneway access to the south and east and is around 100m from North Melbourne station.
We bought the property for $2.3m (ex GST) on a 6 month settlement with a 5% deposit. In August we missed out on a smaller site just around the corner from at 88 Miller St which sold for $2.4m at auction. So it feels like we secured a good deal.
Our plan is to develop 8 x four-storey townhouses with around 120 sqm of living space. Each townhouse would have a footprint of around 40-50m2 so quite compact. We plan to have large roof terraces and balconies to take advantage of the city views to the east. The design challenge will be to make the small footprints feel spacious and also to bring light and visual interest to the units in the middle given their lack of street frontage.
For inspiration we are looking to build on the work of people like:
- Dominic Alvaro and his Small House project in Sydney's Surrey Hills (which sold for $1.88m in 2014),
- Ryue Nishizawa's magnificent Tokyo Garden & House and
- Florian Busch's K8 project in Kyoto.
All of these projects are on blocks of under 50m2.
If you are interested in finding out about upcoming projects in 2016 please feel free to get in touch.