Architect: Blok Modular in collaboration with Vokes & Peters
Completion Date: 2024
Blok Three Sisters is a new multi-residential modular project composed of three coastal terrace houses, constructed in the Blok Modular factory in Brisbane, and assembled at the site on Minjerribah by the same team. Designed for three sisters who had spent their family holidays as children in a house on the same site, the terrace houses enable their shared vacations to continue with their own children and extended families.
Individually the houses are designed with agility and flexibility in mind, in anticipation of the adapting and evolving household population and demands on them to accommodate change in family dynamic. On the entry level, a terrace house can be operated as a one-bedroom apartment arranged across a single storey, with a central garden separating social rooms and sleeping and other private rooms. At the rear of each terrace a generous double-height portico immerses the occupants in the dune vegetation and views of the Pacific Ocean, and is overlooked by an elevated living room. At the upper level, a further two bedrooms are co located with a bathroom, accommodating adult children, friends or grandchildren. One bedroom draws its amenity from the central garden, the other looks over the street to a vegetated hillside.
A defended breezeway connects all rooms of the terrace and terminates at the generous volume of the central garden. As an archetypal spatial device, the garden gathers the sensory delights of the setting alongside day-to-day domestic rituals; the taste of the salty onshore breeze, the clarity of moonlight on the fibro, the echo of the crashing waves, the scent of native jasmine, the restorative feeling of deep shade in summer. In this way, the garden represents both nature and home, universe and family, sky, and the ground. As buildings, the terrace houses become repositories of shared holiday memories and record family life and the passing of time.
Modular procurement supports the charter of the local authority and the sustainability agenda of its planning instrument – building in a factory minimises the level of disruption (often toxic) to the building site, its local community, traffic systems, urban rhythm, and natural ecologies. This is particularly important to fragile systems such as the island location of this project.
Awards
2025
Winner, John Dalton Award for Building of the Year, Greater Brisbane Regional Architecture Awards