Branch Studio Architects’ Florence Street Studio Inside Nightingale 1 in Brunswick, Victoria.

Located within the ground floor of one of Melbourne‘s most socially and environmentally sustainable multi-residential buildings – Nightingale 1 in Brunswick, Victoria – Branch Studio‘s new workspace occupies a compact 45 square metre shell.

The space currently accommodates two directors, an associate and two full-time staff, with plenty of room for expansion. The studio also contains a meeting room, kitchenette, modelling area, pin-up walls and ample storage for physical models and books.

Raw finishes such as concrete and steel contrast with the warmth of natural Australian timbers, soft wall finishes and finely tuned details. Desks and joinery are clad in a combination of utilitarian form-ply and naturally textured blackbutt veneer. Raw black steel is celebrated throughout and refined pragmatically to create splashbacks, removable shelving for books and models. These can be removed to accommodate additional workstations for future growth.

The meeting room or as the team like to call it – ‘Chapel of ideas’ – is clad externally in textured, natural steel, while the interior is lined in black stained plywood.

“[The room] is an intervention inserted into the space to create discussion into architectural history through the use of reference,” explains the team. It was explicitly derived from the chapel within Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Tomb (1969-1977) in San Vito d’Altivole near Treviso, Italy.

“The meeting room is a window into the rich history of architecture, which we regularly find ourselves immersing in, and as a result of our ideas through discussions with our clients and collaborators,” says the team.

For Branch Studio, their new workspace acts as a laboratory for testing their ideas, while serving as a built precedent on their position as a practice committed to the possibilities of light, materials and modest scale architectural space.

Related: Stories On Design // Inside Design & Architecture Studios.

[Images courtesy of Branch Studio Architects. Photography and video by Peter Clarke.]