ROY GROUNDS Experiments in Minimum Living

By Tony Lee

Roy Grounds is well known as the dogmatic and bombastic architect who designed the Australian Academy of Science’s Shine Dome in Canberra and the National Gallery of Victoria along with the Victorian Arts Centre.

This book explores Grounds’ early works and presents a different aspect of his character:
a perceptive architect who used his own lived experience to inform his work. Abandoning his emerging practice and family in 1937, the young Grounds rushed to London in pursuit of a client he had fallen in love with. Penniless and unemployed he lived frugally and simply by flat sitting while becoming familiar with the new Minimum Flat concept. On his return to Melbourne, he utilised the concept to secure work, experimenting with designs for a series of small flats as he built a reputation and was celebrated as Melbourne’s
leading designer of flats at the time. 

Richly illustrated with plans and photographs, this book will delight those with an interest in modernist design and anyone looking for simple and affordable forms of housing.

As Australia continues to grapple with a housing supply crisis and urban sprawl, the series of four built-to-rent flats projects designed by Roy Grounds in 1941 and illustrated in this book show how sensitive design can deliver compact flats that are affordable and decidedly liveable. These flats demonstrate how housing density in a suburban context can be sympathetically increased, while skilfully designed built-in and loose furniture can ensure compact spaces are efficient, comfortable and engaging.
The furniture designed by Grounds for these flats and presented in this book, is now being made under licence by KFive and can be viewed in their Melbourne and Sydney showrooms.

Publisher: Kerritone Publishing
Melbourne, Australia
Author: Tony Lee
Contributors: Jake Taylor and
Professor Philip Goad
Sketch plans: John Cooper
Photographer: Earl Carter
Publication designers:
Garry Emery and Jane Mooney
Hardcover
108 pages
310 mm x 245 mm
ISBN 978 0 646 70634 4