A Melbourne architecture practice has invented a new structural timber system called Cross-Laminated Plywood (CLP) to build its own home on a 22-metre-long, 4.6-metre-wide laneway site in the city’s inner north. That is according to LLDS Architects, whose Northcote House has now swept four major design prizes: the Fit Out – Residential award at the 25th Australian Timber Design Awards, the Premier Award at the 2024 Australian Interior Design Awards, the AIA Victoria Sustainability Award 2024, and Dezeen’s Urban House of the Year 2024.
Developed with TGA Engineers and road-tested through the practice’s research, including a 2020 chapter in the international Fabricate series published by UCL Press, CLP is produced by structurally laminating three layers of 18mm FSC-certified birch plywood, with 19 rafter beams and 76 bracing plates forming the free-form roof of the house and left exposed as a full-length sculptural soffit. Over 70 per cent of the home’s bespoke components were manufactured by LLDS’s sister company Power to Make, a digital fabrication workshop in Preston, five kilometres from the site.
Studio founders Paul Loh and David Leggett, who are also the owners, set the brief as a test of what advanced digital fabrication could deliver for standard inner-city infill, with the design team never having to hand off to a separate contractor. The 22-metre-long plot sits east-west on a former service-lane car park, with the ground plane elevated so a brown roof garden loaded with native planting could sit over the living floor as thermal mass and ecological habitat.
The CLP roof sweeps between two concrete boundary walls and spans a hall-like upper volume that gathers kitchen, dining, and the entrance into a single space, while a sculptural milled plywood staircase descends through a central void into a ground-floor snug. Point cloud scanning of the as-built boundary walls informed both the CLP manufacturing data and the CNC-milled PIR formwork used for the textured internal concrete, with the formwork itself later reused as insulation inside the roof build-up.
Every plywood component is laid up with brass hardware and threaded-rod compression, explicitly designed for disassembly rather than demolition at the end of life, and finished in solvent-free Osmo wood wax. The detail means the full timber package, from the 19 rafter beams down to the 76 bracing plates, can be taken apart, relocated or recycled as a whole rather than chipped or sent to landfill.
ATDA judge Anthony Burke, Professor of Architecture at UTS and host of Grand Designs Australia and Restoration Australia on the ABC, described Northcote House as a standout entry in a competitive fit-out field, pointing to the combination of bespoke fabrication, material transparency and design ingenuity across a 4.6-metre-wide footprint. The scheme was also shortlisted in the AIA Victoria New Residential and Interior Architecture categories at the 2024 awards.
Awarding Northcote House the Premier Award at the 2024 Australian Interior Design Awards, the jury said the project had “rigorously challenged each member’s way of thinking about residential interiors,” citing the five-kilometre local manufacturing radius as the factor that gave the scheme its edge across a competitive shortlist.
Entries for the 27th Australian Timber Design Awards are now open, with Loh and Leggett’s Northcote House — 80 square metres, 19 CLP rafter beams, 76 bracing plates, four major prizes — built entirely from components milled within five kilometres of the site.
