The SDA Housing Project comprises two purpose-designed Robust homes for Disability Homes Victoria, conceived as a pilot to demonstrate how architectural quality can improve everyday living while supporting durability. The project resolves complexity within a modest residential form through robust construction and discreetly integrated services, balancing safety while ensuring the spaces read as a home rather than an institutional environment.

Generous living spaces with raked cathedral ceilings create a sense of openness and comfort. Relationships to landscape are prioritised throughout, with planted outlooks and courtyards that offer retreat. Colour and delight are introduced in the bathrooms, moving away from the typically clinical approach.

Set within a suburban context, the building holds a quiet residential presence, balancing openness with privacy and offering small civic gestures. The project seeks to operate as a modest precedent for delivering this demanding housing typology with dignity, generosity, and care for residents and their support workers.

Jury comments for the 2026 ArchitectureAu Award for Social Impact – Commendation:

“This prototype housing for Disability Homes Victoria attends to the dearth of design investment in supported disability accommodation, particularly within the “robust” category. Through carefully considered spatial arrangements, material palette, detailing and environmental performance, the project successfully navigates a series of complex and competing relationships between home and workplace, privacy and connection, safety and independence, comfort and durability, and efficiency and amenity.

The project sets a new standard for this typology while offering an opportunity to explore, through post-occupancy evaluation, how design can make a difference in disability housing for the wellbeing of residents and for the organisations who provide support.”