The Growing Trend of Apartment Living: Paul Hecker On Designing an Apartment for Life

The Australian dream used to be a house on a quarter-acre block; a little suburban paradise to call our own. But these days Australians are becoming more inclined to stay in apartments long-term – whether for affordable access to desired locations, or as low-maintenance alternatives for busy lifestyles or downsizing.

Plenty of countries and cultures are already well-acquainted with apartment living. To keep up with this trend in Australia, interior designers like Paul Hecker, co-founder of studio Hecker Guthrie, are starting to think more deeply about how grand scale apartments need to look and feel to stand the test of time.

Homes full of character
Some apartments feel anonymous, devoid of the sort of welcoming character we look for in a forever home. Correcting that is part of the challenge for designers like Hecker. “We’re trying to find those touchpoints that we can refer to that bring people back to this idea that it’s actually a home,” he says.

Hecker says the key is using the space to create meaning rather than just function. “Things like the apartments all having a proper entry, somewhere to meet and greet so you don’t walk straight into a living room,” says Hecker. Something as simple as a distinctive front door can be the difference between a sterile space and a welcoming one. “You walk down a lot of corridors and they’re just doors in walls,” he says. “They feel like it could be a hospital or hotel room.” With some apartments becoming sized similarly to a traditional home, they can be thoughtfully curated through design to feel private, premium and prodigious.

Space and privacy
A perceived lack of room and privacy is a reservation people have about apartment living, but as Hecker has found from working on Camberwell’s Victoria Hill development, the answer is in the layout. “For instance, the locations of the powder rooms are near the entry but away from the living room," says Hecker. "So you don’t feel like you come out of a powder room and everyone’s staring at you." To imbue a sense of privacy inside, Hecker also likes to avoid having living rooms that lead directly into every other room.

Playing the long game
One of the biggest challenges for interior designers is creating a space with warmth and charm that won’t quickly date or clash with individual styles. “As soon as you add too much colour or too many timber types or too many stone types, it becomes very hard to introduce your own personality,” says Hecker. “What we don’t want to do is become problematic, like, ‘Look at those pink tiles,’ or ‘That screams 2023’. So, we’re constantly trying to refer to ideas of good design as opposed to what’s fashionable and current.”

In the Victoria Hill development, those subtle aspects of design are taken from timeless designs. “Because [Camberwell] is an established residential area, we used elements within the building that start to talk to a traditional home,” says Hecker. “We had a cream and white chequerboard floor in the entry, so even some of the references with materiality speak to a classic home, without making it classic.”

Watch: Modern Nostalgia is the Future of Apartment Living
Architect Callum Fraser is responsible for helping to design some of Australia’s most visible and celebrated buildings. In our series on looking at how we'll live, work and play in the cities of our future, we meet Fraser to find out how key existing buildings might hold the clues to what our cities might look like.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Time & Place and Victoria Hill – The Residences. See more information or enquire on a grand scale home at Victoria Hill – The Residences now.