Eastop Architects is a Melbourne-based practice led by architects Liam Eastop and Lauren Trainor, established in 2017. Despite the studio’s youth, it has produced in Elm Tree Place a work of considerable maturity, nuance and, literally and figuratively, reflection.
Elm Tree Place is a residence that converts an early adaptation project by celebrated architect Nonda Katsalidis, the Deutscher Fine Art Gallery in Carlton, Melbourne. Katsalidis’s project, completed in the 1980s, was a gallery space built at the rear of a Victorian terrace and Eastop Architects’ work splits that commercial property into two private dwellings. Stepping into such fertile terrain could have elicited a range of responses that either stepped away from the precedent entirely or paid overt reverence to what has gone before. Eastop Architects has taken a third way,…
