As far as renovation projects go, turning an aged garage into a luxury home is as challenging as they come. To pull off the build, owner Lola Smith and her team of architects and builders had to think outside the box. “It was a very difficult journey because of space constraints,” Smith said.
“Any smaller we would have had huge problems, I think.” Smith set out to transform the block after buying it at auction in 2020 , when she and her husband paid $645,500, which was $245,500 more than the vendor’s reserve price. The block had been subdivided from the adjoining block at its rear and sold to a plumber for $8000 in the 1980s.
The plumber used the garage to store his tools. The two-bedroom house is listed for sale as an expressions-of-interest campaign with Marshall White agent Nicholas Hoo and a quoted price range of $2 million to $2.2 million.
To make the best use of the tiny, roughly 50-square-metre block of land in Albert Park, they decided on prefabricated concrete slabs, which also helped to minimise the amount of time the street was closed. “The prefab people are in Colac and what they do is they drive it overnight, they park close by here and in the morning they arrived and assembled it in a day-and-a-half,” Smith said. The block was so small the builders couldn’t put up scaffolding — so an inventive solution was needed.
Smith’s builder, Willoworks’ Matt Williamson, helped overcome this shortcoming by suggesting the design of the concrete shell in.