A Victorian Terrace Recalibrated for a Slower Way of Living by Manifold.

It’s been exactly three years since we first published a Manifold project here on Yellowtrace, and watching this Melbourne and Sydney-based studio grow and evolve over that time has been one of our quiet pleasures. Their work keeps getting sharper, more confident, more themselves—and their latest residential project is perhaps the clearest expression yet of what they do so well.

Located in South Yarra, this late-Victorian terrace had been through one too many renovations, each one chipping away at the home’s original coherence. Manifold’s task working alongside Odyssey Architecture for documentation and JALA for the landscape—was to restore a sense of wholeness without erasing history.

Studio Manifold & Simone Haag Transform a Yarra Valley Farmhouse with Mid-Century Soul.

Material choices—recycled timbers, terrazzo, ceramic tiles, and raw brass—ground the project in place, while the colour palette pulls straight from the valley landscape.

This home is now calibrated around the rhythms of daily life. The client was downsizing from a larger family house, and that context shapes everything here: spaces designed not for performance or occasion, but for the slow accumulation of ordinary moments. Morning light drifts through the kitchen and bedrooms; evenings pull you toward the moodier living and dining rooms. It’s all very intentional.

Heritage references are handled with a light touch—simplified cornices that conceal air conditioning, expressed skirtings that mark junctions cleanly, heightened openings that reinforce the home’s verticality. Nothing screams, nothing over-explains.

The material palette follows the same logic: a monolithic stainless-steel island anchors the kitchen with quiet authority, while custom timber dining tables—fabricated by Mark Tuckey, one for the kitchen and one for the blue dining room—bring warmth and tactility to spaces meant to be lived in.

Sight-lines were opened up to draw light deeper into the plan, but rooms remain connected rather than exposed, preserving the terrace’s inherent intimacy. The garden and courtyard, reimagined with JALA, extend the interior palette outward—soft, evolving, a counterpoint to the more restrained interior finishes.

“TRW Terrace feels like an evolution of its Victorian origins rather than a departure from them,” explain Lachlan Cooper and Morgan Novy of Manifold—and that, really, is the highest compliment this kind of project can earn. It doesn’t try to be more than it is. It just quietly becomes what it was always meant to be.

Heritage Meets Colour Joy at Thiss Studio’s Hartley House in London.

This renovation of a Victorian era terraced house takes the client brief of connections to the garden, a study sans-children, and a family-focussed kitchen space and celebrates with a sustainable approach, elements of whimsy and a renovation that does not push for more space, but rather, heroes what is already there.

[Images courtesy of Manifold. Photography by Traianos Pakioufakis.]