The financing model is the first interesting thing. The City of Banyule entered a 50-year ground lease with Launch Housing, leasing public land at peppercorn rent to enable the development. It cost the council almost nothing – one old car park – and produced 58 homes for people facing urgent, life-threatening or severe housing crises.

The construction method is the second interesting thing. ARM built Bellfield out of timber – a shrewd decision about cost, carbon and performance. The timber structure reduced embodied carbon significantly; a solar PV array and a recyclable facade system combine to achieve a 7.5 NatHERS rating. The result is a high-performance building built using low-technology domestic construction methods – stick-build carpentry at a scale the industry keeps telling us isn't viable. (It is viable.) It's also a building with roughly half the carbon of projects that fetishise exposed concrete while talking loudly about the environment.

The 58 apartments are a mix of studios, one-bedroom and two-bedroom dwellings – types in significant shortage in the area, especially for those on low to moderate incomes. Like Viv’s Place, there are communal gardens, shared lounge, dining and kitchen, as well as office and consult spaces, bike store and outdoor BBQ area. Bringing local community into the process over a campfire, First Nations artist Cassie Fisher-Patterson worked with Spacecraft Studio on original artwork that brings life and spirit to the building.

A cross-grain timber facade enlivens the building with dynamic patterning – character and identity delivered in the last 5 percent of the design, on top of a construction system that's 95 percent standardised and entirely replicable. Which highlights that this building isn’t a one-off, it’s a proof of concept for what the housing sector could be doing at scale, right now, with the tools and land already available. Cities sitting on underutilised land can follow this lead.