Lot 03 As walked 2022
Approach · From parcel to place
We keep the same boundary from the first site walk to the day we hand over the keys. Here is one of them, four times.
01 · Months 0 to 3
We walk every site before we buy it, usually more than once and at different hours. We look for what a plan cannot add later: a north aspect, old trees worth keeping, a street that is quiet by design. Most sites fail on one of those, and we walk away.
02 · Months 3 to 9
Before Clara draws a line, the site is measured: levels every two metres, soil bores, sun hours in June and December, the neighbours’ windows, every tree’s root zone. The boundary does not move after this, so everything the houses become has to fit inside what we find here.
03 · Months 9 to 26
Oliver’s own crew sets out and pours the footprint. We do not hand the build to a contractor and visit on Fridays: one of us is on site every morning. Once the slab is down the plan is fixed, which is why the first two stages take as long as they do.
04 · Handover
Finished inside the line we drew at the first site walk. Every owner gets the drawings, the survey and the name of every trade who worked on the house, and the builder stays on call for ten years after the keys change hands.
The two names on the title
Builder · Site, trades and budget
Oliver has built houses in Melbourne for thirty years, the last twelve of them his own. He runs the site, the trades and the money, and he is on every Harrow & Vale site before the first delivery each morning. He still frames a roof when a crew is short, and he still tells Clara when a drawing will not stand.
“A house is only as good as the morning someone checked the set-out.”
Architect · Every house, nothing else
Clara trained in Melbourne and worked in Copenhagen before coming home to draw houses with Oliver. She designs every Harrow & Vale home and nothing else, which keeps the practice small on purpose. Her houses start from the survey, not a style: where the sun lands, what the trees allow, what the street asks for.
“If the drawing fights the site, the site wins. Better to lose that argument on paper.”
Few sites · Since 2014
Register · Lot 04
The next parcel settles in 2026. The people on this list see it, and walk it with us, before anyone else.