1 Spring Street
Studio Kennon’s 1 Spring Street is a minimalist studio located in Melbourne, Australia, designed by Studio Kennon. The project represents a deliberate reclamation of physical proximity as creative necessity, transforming a heritage-listed Harry Seidler tower originally built for Shell headquarters in 1989 into a workspace that prioritizes collaborative presence over remote isolation. Founder Pete Kennon’s decision to occupy this iconic modernist structure reflects both practical needs and symbolic alignment with the building’s architectural rigor, translating Seidler’s formal language of curves and exposed aggregate into an interior intervention that honors rather than competes with its container.
The design strategy operates through restraint. Rather than imposing color, the studio draws material warmth from texture alone, reinterpreting the building’s dense exposed aggregates and granite slabs through natural renders, plasters, and layered finishes. This material translation creates continuity between structure and inhabitation while softening the corporate austerity inherent in the original tower typology. The curve, Seidler’s defining motif throughout the building’s exterior, becomes an organizing principle for interior circulation. A sweeping curved wall flanks the heritage-listed staircase, drawing sight lines from the entry lounge through to a library and design room that deliberately blur the boundary between professional studio and residential comfort.
Spatial organization follows a rhythm of transition mediated by Seidler’s original Japanese winter garden, a preserved element that acts as both literal separator and atmospheric filter. Light passing through this garden softens the threshold between informal gathering zones and the formal design spaces beyond, where walls still bear traces of the corporate suites that once filled the building. This layering of histories creates productive tension: a petroleum company’s administrative tower reimagined as a home for creative collaboration, the rigidity of executive function replaced by what the studio describes as a bubbly energy, though the architecture itself maintains measured sophistication.
The library emerges as the strongest expression of Studio Kennon’s design identity. Shelves filled with volumes spanning architecture, art, fashion, and literature establish a physical archive that positions the studio between professional practice and domestic intimacy. This room resists categorical definition, existing simultaneously as research repository, client presentation space, and retreat for contemplative work. The terrace extends this spatial ambiguity outward, offering an informal counterpoint to the tower’s vertical formality while providing connection to Melbourne’s sky and cityscape. For Kennon, raised in rural Victoria where horizons stretch uninterrupted, this elevated outdoor room restores a sense of spatial expanse often lost in urban density.
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