Ys Housing‘s pilot project in Reservoir replaces the driveway that usually organizes a Melbourne townhouse block with a shared courtyard, splitting four dwellings into two street-facing pairs instead of one car-dominated strip. As both architect and developer, the studio designed Shand Road as a repeatable model for the 15-meter (49-foot) frontage lot that recurs across the city’s middle suburbs. The courtyard-first plan, medium-density scale, and integrated delivery model are built to be tested again, not admired once.
Reorganizing the block starts with what Shand Road removes: the conventional gunbarrel driveway that typically eats the center of a townhouse site and turns the street elevation into a wall of garage doors. Ys Housing says the plan simply inverts the conventional townhouse typology, replacing the driveway with shared courtyard access that organizes how residents move through the site. Breaking the four townhouses into two distinct forms keeps the rhythm of the streetscape intact, reduces overlooking between neighbors, and lets the front pair actively engage the street — a courtyard logic not unlike the one anchoring Steffen Welsch’s Cloud Street House a few suburbs over.
Working as both architect and developer across design, cost, and delivery is what makes the courtyard move viable at this scale. The integrated model lets Ys Housing hold onto design quality that volume-built housing typically sacrifices, while staying more accessible than one-off bespoke architecture. Gross built area across the four townhouses comes to 562 square meters (6,050 square feet), split between two- and three-bedroom units aimed at the kind of medium-density infill housing middle-ring suburbs are short on.
Its material language borrows from two unrelated vernaculars at once: the plainness of the Australian shack and the precision of contemporary Japanese residential architecture. Zincalume cladding, anodised aluminium, and metal guttering carry the shack reference, paired with a restraint focused on long-lasting materials and careful proportion — a materiality that shares more with the small-footprint economy of Baracco+Wright’s House With a Stair Room than with anything typically built at this density.
Semi-translucent FRP screens act as blinkers between the dwellings, filtering sightlines between neighbors while still letting light and air move through — a quiet negotiation between privacy and porosity rather than a solid party wall. Front decks borrow from the Japanese engawa tradition, turning what would usually be an ornamental setback into a lived-in threshold between house and street. This is where the shack and the engawa actually meet: not in imagery, but in how each dwelling is allowed to spill outward.
Balconies read as outdoor rooms rather than afterthoughts bolted onto the facade. Cablemesh balustrades keep residents visually connected to the street and sky, while enclosed walls with large openings provide shelter without closing the space off entirely. Inside, living room ceilings range from 3 to 3.6 meters (9.8 to 11.8 feet), a modest but deliberate generosity given the project’s cost constraints.
A repeating material palette of Tasmanian oak, pine, fluted glass, stainless steel, and cablemesh runs through the interiors, balancing durability against a sense of spatial lightness. A flexible upstairs zone shifts function by household — a home office in one townhouse, a bedroom for visiting parents in another. Interiors themselves stay deliberately simple and neutral, an unfinished quality that hands residents the room to personalize their own space over time rather than inheriting a fully resolved aesthetic.
Running costs were treated as part of the design brief rather than an add-on. The four townhouses are all-electric and solar-powered, with heat-pump hot water systems doubling as thermal batteries and rainwater harvested for reuse. Passive solar design principles — orientation, massing, glazing — do the rest of the thermal work, while nohLa’s landscape design maximizes the permeability of the site so that stormwater becomes something the garden can use rather than something the block simply sheds.
As a pilot, Shand Road isn’t finished once its four townhouses are occupied — it’s finished once someone else builds the next version on a different 15-meter lot. What stays with the project isn’t the courtyard itself but the quieter fact behind it: on a site engineered to shed water as fast as possible, the landscape now gets to keep some of it.
Shand Road by Ys Housing | Location: Reservoir, Victoria, Australia — Year: 2025 — Key materials: Zincalume cladding, anodised aluminium, timber, FRP screens, Tasmanian oak