Upward Spiral

Transforming a former factory into his family home was pivotal, both personally and professionally, for architect Rob Mills.

- Karen McCartney

As an architect Rob Mills is good at playing the long game. He sat on an empty block in the Victorian seaside town of Lorne from 2003 before building his remarkable Ocean House there in 2012. To convert this former cardboard factory on the edge of a park in Melbourne’s Armadale he has waited even longer.

Bought more than 14 years ago, it is a pivotal building both in his life and his professional development. Not only did he connect profoundly to its expansive interior space and lack of interior walls, but importantly it taught him the power of the void.

When he first lived there it had already seen the effect of an architect’s hand – just not his. “The first architectural intervention took away some of the floor and created a two-storey void and a 17-metre living space, engineered a terrace overlooking the park and designed a loft bedroom. It was the perfect warehouse space that had been tamed but not too much,” says Rob.

The experience of living in the warehouse changed his course as an architect, opening up his residential designs to lofty rooms where space, views and a tactile material palette are the defining features, albeit interpreted to suit the more polished realm of his high-end clientele.