A Verdant And Varied Courtyard Is Revealed

The outside world disappears in this private courtyard garden of luminous greens and wondrous shapes.

- Elizabeth Wilson 

Buying an old corner pub and converting it into a contemporary home requires imagination and a sense of adventure. For the owners of this inner-urban Melbourne property the adventure has well and truly paid off, with the creation of a unique residence and an equally gorgeous, jewel-like courtyard garden.

To transform the 1870s building into a family home, they enlisted Don McQualter of Studio McQualter, whose design response was to restore the original corner structure and construct a mirror-image, double-storey building at the other end of the property. To link these bookends he designed a long, single-level pavilion containing an openplan living zone which is glazed along one entire wall.

At the epicentre of the site is a narrow 15x3m slice of outdoor space, which is framed by these three facets of the home and a tall boundary wall. The owners were keen to make this a textural, plant-filled space. And that’s where landscape designer Kate Seddon entered the picture.

“Every room in the home looks out to, or through another room to, this courtyard,” says Kate. “It’s visible from all angles, so it’s an important focal point for the whole home.”

The owners were keen to create a European-style courtyard garden like those they’d seen on overseas travels. “They love the gardens you find in Italy, France or Spain where you open a doorway into an enclosed courtyard festooned with vines and pot plants,” says Kate. “They wanted to conjure a sense of that here, to create a magical oasis hidden behind the wall.”