Little Frankland
An inner-city retrofit in Launceston, designed with Design to Live.
The brief
Take a small inner-city apartment and make it genuinely good to live in — on a budget that left no room for the usual answer of “knock it down and start again”.
Small-footprint city living is having a moment in Tasmania for sensible reasons: location, low running costs, and not maintaining a quarter-acre you never use. What holds it back is that most of the existing stock was built without insulation, without thought for light, and to plans that made sense in 1970.
The build
This one was stripped and gutted — back to the shell, then rebuilt.
Retrofit is harder than new build, and the reason is simple: you do not know what is behind a wall until it is open. On a new build the unknowns are in the ground; on a retrofit they are everywhere, and they arrive in the middle of a programme. That is exactly why we run these open-book — when the unknowns are larger, a fixed price is either padded to cover what might be there, or it becomes an argument later. Neither serves the client.
A gut also creates one genuine opportunity a new build takes for granted: with the linings off, insulation, air sealing and services can be done properly rather than worked around. A small city apartment that has been sealed and insulated is cheap to heat almost by accident — the volume is small and the losses are gone.
Working in an occupied building has its own rules too: noise, access, protecting common areas, and a site that is tidy at the end of every day because other people live there.
The result
A refreshed inner-city home that works, on a budget that made the whole thing possible.
See our renovations work or more Launceston projects. Photography by Tassie Visuals.
