Courtyard House is a minimalist house located in Melbourne, Australia, designed by Office MI-JI. A covenant drawn up in 1918 still governs what this site can present to the world, restricting every visible wall and roof to tile, brick, or concrete. The practice absorbed that century-old clause as a brief, laying double concrete block at ground level and rendered brick above, so a restriction written before modernism arrived in Australia ends up determining the material logic of a house completed in 2024.
Four quadrants of occupation sit within a loose nine-square grid, a plan device with a particular pedagogical lineage. John Hejduk built a teaching method around the nine-square problem, using it to force a reckoning with structure, edge, and center before anything else could happen. Office MI-JI deploys it looser and more pragmatically, letting each quadrant answer its own climatic and programmatic demands through aperture, outlook, and roof profile, while the kitchen holds the center as the shared ground. The occupants are an artist and a businessperson who also function as grandparents, and the plan reads as an argument that a single household can contain genuinely different ways of living without dissolving into open plan sameness.
Separating the two masonry palettes is a band of pale blue steel that runs continuously around the building. The parallel flange channel is standard structural stock, and the practice works it hard, letting the same section act as lintel, rainhead, awning, and soft boundary depending on where it lands. It functions as a datum in the way a string course does on a nineteenth century terrace, registering the shift between ground and upper floor while giving the elevations their only note of color. Getting a great deal from very little is the studio’s stated ambition, and the channel is where that ambition is most legible.
