Moffat Morphing House in Houses Magazine 167

For a house that occupies a small footprint, Moffat Morphing House pulls off some big moves. The 75-square-metre residence – built in the backyard of an existing freestanding shop in the Sunshine Coast suburb of Moffat Beach – is a clever example of gentle density and infill housing on a mixed-use site. The house also possesses a flexible program that will adapt to the needs of its owners over time. Matt Kennedy from Arcke has designed a shapeshifting shop house that breathes new life into a time-tested concept for housing.

The combination of a house co-located with a shop matches the local pattern of one- and two-storey mixed-use buildings that populate Moffat Beach’s main streets. It’s a typology that has persisted since the 1940s, with private dwellings located above or behind retail tenancies. Shop houses provide a gentle – almost invisible – form of density to neighbourhoods. Their prevalence in beachside locations provides accommodation options in summer, when a town’s population swells with the influx of holidaymakers, while maintaining active occupation of the building when the home is empty at other times of the year. Moffat Morphing House renders a twenty-first- century version of the horizontal shop house, where the home is physically detached from the shopfront.

Read the full story by Kirsty Volz here. Published in Houses Magazine.

Images by Christopher Frederick Jones