There is a version of sustainable apartment design that announces itself: solar panels on the roof, green star ratings in the marketing copy, recycled timber as an afterthought. ParkLife 2 in Brunswick takes a different position. Here, sustainability is the design brief.
Designed by Austin Maynard Architects and delivered by HIP V. HYPE, the project is located on Albert Street with Clifton Park at its front door and Gilpin Park directly across the street. 61 apartments across eight storeys, all 100 per cent electric, all with park views that won’t be built out.
The project is direct sequel to Austin Maynard’s original ParkLife — part of Nightingale Village in Brunswick, which in 2023 won The Multi-Resdiential Building at the INDE.Awards and the Frederick Romberg Award for Residential Architecture at the AIA National Architecture Awards. It is also the first collaboration between the two practices, and both describe it as an effort to go further than what came before.
The architecture responds to what’s already there. A natural colour palette drawn from the surrounding landscape, generous glazing that pulls the parks inside and a communal rooftop yard enclosed by a mesh structure where children can play freely. The design doesn’t separate the building from its green surroundings; it extends them inward.
Inside, the material palette is warm and specific. Timber floors run through open-plan living spaces. Kitchens open onto park views. Bathrooms have walnut vanities and small plants on the shelf. These are details that accumulate into homes where someone has already put their books on the shelf and hung their art.
Visuals created by CUUB Studio show how these homes are designed to feel. Morning light through a bedroom window, a kitchen that looks used, interiors where families and everyday life are visible rather than staged. Soft, even daylight across every room, green accents carrying through from the façade into the interior, finishes represented with enough accuracy to carry the character of the architecture rather than idealise it: this is the kind of styling that makes a space feel like someone already lives there.
Sustainability in residential design works best when it disappears into the experience of living, when the all-electric system is just how the heating works, when the park view is just what you see from the kitchen, when the timber and the light and the air quality are simply what the apartment feels like. ParkLife 2 is designed so that sustainability disappears into the experience of living. The point is the life inside.