354 Bowden

Australians need affordable housing choices, with a mixture of dwelling styles and densities that cater to all ages and life stages. This includes well-designed neighbourhoods with higher residential density and mixed housing types that will facilitate active lifestyles, social interaction and offer safe environments with access to amenities.

Consistent with the Developer’s Urban Design Guidelines vision, 354 Bowden embraces and celebrates Bowden’s walkable neighbourhood design, a desired feature of city-fringe living within metropolitan Adelaide.

Residential in nature, the design supports, influences, and forges a creative and diverse community who live and work within a high-density, yet sustainable, urban environment. Its character, parklands connections and integrated urban design offer a new and distinctive place in Adelaide for residents and visitors.

Brief

The challenge of 354 Bowden was to deliver a new, charismatic model for city-fringe living that would inspire through heightened levels of creativity, connectivity, and great design.

Bowden Urban Design Guidelines:

• A sustainable and commercially feasible residential, retail, and commercial walkable neighbourhood.
• An internally and externally connected community both physically and virtually, in the context of the great Adelaide city.
• A development that is flexible and capable of adapting to changing market and demographic conditions.
• Expertise in infrastructure, streets, parks, and development that is transferable to other infill sites locally and nationally.
• A development that leads the market and expands the range of dwelling types currently offered in Adelaide.

Design

The public realm area of 354 Bowden is heterogeneous, distinctive, robust, and rich in history. At street level, the internal courtyard provides a semi-private garden in scale with the built form.

The courtyard offers resident respite and interaction of all ages in the creation of a series of outdoor rooms. The spaces are varied, textured, and inviting, and integrate with the development’s character and parklands connections.

These external environments coordinate using architecture as an integrated design, resulting in sympathetic spaces to the surrounding built form and natural environment. Small and medium-sized trees planted in raised planters soften the courtyard and ensures the external environment has shade and texture.

Throughout both stages, industrial materials, such as exposed and painted concrete panels, steel screens, external timber, and brick, were used to pay homage to the suburb’s history.

The integrated urban design for 354 Bowden is successful in offering an exciting, desirable, and distinctive city-fringe living for both residents and visitors alike.