The Egg

A distinctive architectural project in inner Launceston, designed with 60 Degrees — three dwellings on one constrained city site, two of them new.

The brief

Get three dwellings onto a tight inner-city block, with the principal residence built as a high-end home for owners who entertain properly and often.

Two things had to be true at once. The development had to stack up commercially — this was delivered into the 2019–20 market, and the timing rewarded getting it built rather than getting it perfect on paper. And the main house had to be a genuinely good home, not a compromise carved out of a development site.

The build

Access was the defining constraint. The site sits on an inner-city street with no parking, which sounds like a minor inconvenience and is in fact the single biggest driver of programme on a project like this. Every delivery has to be scheduled rather than arriving. Concrete pours, crane lifts and trade vehicles compete for the same few metres of kerb. Materials cannot be dropped and left. On a three-dwelling build, that multiplies — you are running three jobs through one pinch point.

The answer is sequencing, worked out well before anyone breaks ground: consolidated deliveries, trades booked in a strict order rather than overlapping, and a site plan that treats space itself as a scheduled resource.

Density brings its own detailing. Three dwellings on one title means fire separation, acoustic separation between tenancies, shared services and boundary conditions that a standalone house never raises. Get those wrong and they are not fixable later.

The main residence had to hold its own. An entertainer’s home is a circulation problem disguised as a living problem — when twenty people are in a house, the failures are always a bottlenecked kitchen, a single route to outside, and a bathroom nobody can reach without crossing a conversation. Those get solved by deciding early where people will stand, not just where they will sit.