Envy Apartment

455 Eye Street NW, a new apartment building, incorporates three historic buildings . All images from Equity Residential used with permission. As DC grows, new buildings are often required to incorporate historic structures . That’s easier said than done, but the results can be worth the effort. Here’s how one new apartment building in Mount Vernon Triangle incorporated three historic buildings for new uses. Located within the Mount Vernon Triangle Historic District , 455 Eye Street is a 174- unit residential building that opened this June. It consists of a tower atop three historic buildings around a landscaped courtyard. The historic structures provide a focal point and now house the building’s amenity spaces and a future restaurant. Here’s how they did it The District of Columbia is home to 27,000 buildings in 60 historic districts, including 600 buildings designated as historic landmarks with the National Trust for Historic Preservation . DC’s Office of Planning reviewed m...

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...